Software To Check Essay

University at Buffalo computer scientists and researchers are developing a computational tool that could significantly reduce the time it takes to grade handwritten essays, as well as improve students' reading comprehension skills. The software under development is being designed to work with the standardized English Language Arts exams administered every year by the public school systems in every state, and could eventually relieve teachers of the task of grading the children's essays. Preliminary results with the software will be published in the February/March issue of Artificial Intelligence. Using handwritten essays from eighth graders in Buffalo's public schools, the software was able to grade the essays within one point of the score teachers gave the essays on a six point scale 70 percent of the time. Sargur N. Srihari, director of UB's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition, says the software involves two significant artificial intelligence problems, handwriting recognition and an artificial neural network for automated grading. "In this method, the system 'learns' from a set of answers that were scored already by humans, associating different values or scores with different features in the essays," Srihari says. Although some teachers may doubt a computer's ability to accurately grade essays, James L. Collins, UB education professor and co-investigator, says, "Computational linguistics has made great leaps over the past decade and it turns out that for judging the overall quality of a paper, computers are indeed as reliable as human graders."