No talking back to this test grader.

• Position: Stateline - Artificial intelligence, Pennsylvania - Brief Article

Bias by test graders? Maybe not--if it's a computer. In a Pennsylvania pilot project, essay tests (being taken by more than 35,000 fifth, eighth and 11th graders) are being graded by a computer that uses artificial intelligence. The computers are given the assigned topic, called a writing prompt, and then are fed a few hundred essays that have been previously graded by humans. They are programmed to measure such elements as grammar, content, focus, style and organization. Developers of these systems say they are at least as accurate as humans, not to mention faster...