Technology or Teacher?

Throughout my years of middle and high school I have really enjoyed the feedback given by teachers to my writing, which has grown and progressed over time. I believe that my writing would have ceased to improve if the various pieces of advice were never shared with me and for this reason I believe that the Robo-Reader should not be used to grade papers. Sure technology can get many papers graded much faster than a teacher can read even one as seen in Source B, “an e-Rater can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds”, but why should the convenience of time take the opportunity to get to know a student’s ability away?

Many people express their feelings and thoughts more in depth when writing class papers and essays, especially high school students. When the teacher reads and grades the assignment, it provides an opportunity to see their perspective and understand a different way of thinking. Not only does this help build relationships between teacher and student, the feedback allows the student insight on other useful ideas or tactics to utilize. Torie Bosch states that teachers are more or less inconsistent graders and so the creation of software that matches the grading of professionals is of substantial difficulty (Source D). I think many students would agree that overall teachers in McFarland are extremely consistent when reviewing student work. Also if the reader would be inconsistent for being unable to identify well with professional grading, it should not be used. As shown by Steve Kolwich, “But can a machine that cannot draw out meaning, and cares nothing for creativity or truth, really match the work of a human reader?” (Source A). A paper graded by a teacher or this new software would make for completely different experiences as the two would be searching for different criteria.

I also feel that using this Robo-Reader and E-reader software will cause the writing of people all across America to become all too similar as well as change the teachings and freedom of the English language. Michael Winerip states that “if you’re not allowed to use a sentence fragment, if you’re not allowed to use a, you know, short paragraph, sometimes that can be very dramatic. And, if those are breaking the rules, you’re going to get a more and more homogenized form of writing when the joy of writing is surprise” (Source E). As a high school student that writes many papers over the course of a year, I like having the freedom to apply my voice and style by repeating statements, making some lines shorter than others, and so on. With a Robo-Reader my creative rights would be stripped from me and I would quickly be made to conform to some boring style and mold of writing that I wouldn’t enjoy, thus taking away the fun and exciting essence that writing can have. This will give writing a bad name over the years and make students less motivated to construct a solid paper.

Though these new software programs may make work easier on the professionals, it does no justice to the students and benefits us in no way, shape, or form. True that it may be able to return papers quicker, but I would much rather wait and have personal feedback over that of a machine that searches for nit-picky things. Writing deserves to be graded upon its creative basis and I know that teacher will consider that whereas this software will not.