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Back in the day I graded 200 essays by hand, then tried a word count cutoff and felt sick about it
I taught a night class at a community college in Dayton for a few semesters and grading 200 short essays a week was eating my whole weekend. About 6 months in, I tried a trick where I only read the first paragraph and the last paragraph, and gave a grade from those two pieces. It cut my time from 9 hours down to 3, and I swear the grades came out almost identical to the ones I used to give after reading every word. At first I felt like I was cheating the students, but then I started wondering how many real systems already do a cheaper version of that. A friend who works in insurance claims said his company has been triaging files with a simple rule set for years, long before anyone called it an algorithm. If a machine does that same shortcut at scale, is it unfair, or is it just what we were already doing? Would love to hear how other people draw that line.
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jessica70715d ago
Ngl that word count thing would actually tick me off as a student because the whole point of the assignment is the thinking, not hitting a number. And holding up the insurance thing doesn't work either, a claim file is a record of facts, an essay is a person trying to show you what they learned, those are not the same thing at all. Reading only the first and last paragraph means you flat out miss the argument in the middle, which is usually where the real writing lives. Just because the shortcut saves you 6 hours does not make it fair to the kid who wrote a slow build into something great.
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