I found the blog, Teaching Writing In An Online World some time ago. It is a joint blog from Nick Carbone and Tengrrl -- an interesting blog overall, especially for those interested in education.
But the fun part was different.
Nick was reporting on the keynote speech at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC or 4Cs) by Doug Hesse
Doug shared with the C's audience the results of a game he first reported to WPA-L on, where he pasted an essay on "aphasia" created with the essay generator* into Knowledge Assessment Technologies Intelligent Essay Assessor. The results were hilarious, but sobering too, considering that this kind of grading technology is being sold not only for placement purposes, but also increasingly to be used in courses as a way to supplement teacher feedback. (More on this issue in a later post on a session about machine scoring.)
*The "essay generator" seems to be an enticing front for an evangelical website.
Machine-scored essays. The "gender detector" told me that I was male on 4 of 5 trials. The machine-scored essay did not detect a content-free "essay" generated by the toy above.
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