I'd like to start this lecture on the use of technology in education by talking about a subject that's probably close to all your hearts, which is the way that student work is graded, and specifically I want to talk to you about some of the ways written assignments or essays are marked.
Well, as you all know, traditionally writing done by a student is checked, marked and graded by a teacher, a tutor or in some situations an examiner, in other words, a real person. Software to mark essays has been in development for some time and grading software on computers is already used by some universities to mark exams but it is still viewed with suspicion by some. How can a computer mark an essay they ask? Well, a recent study compared the human ability to give grades to student essays to the ability of a computer to do the same job. In the study, over 16,000 essays were used. These essays had already been previously marked by at least one trained human grader.
The study showed that the essay marks given by the computer software were almost the same as those from human graders - which I think you'll agree is a controversial result and ifs likely to make us as teachers re-evaluate how we grade written work.