What To Know About Automated Grading – Online Education and Online Tutoring

Researchers are divided on whether automated essay grading is as efficient as human grading.

While computer-assisted essay grading is common in school standardized testing, it hasn't been generally accepted in higher education.

In various college programs, students have to wait days or weeks for their instructors to critique their homework.

But it does not have to be that way, experts say. Swap that human faculty with a computer, and students will have a score within seconds.

As many open online courses continue to generate interest, more online international students are being exposed to computer-assisted essay grading. The nonprofit MOOC provider founded by Harvard University and the MIT, for instance, launched automated grading software last year and openly available on the Internet.

Georgia Tech, which is providing its own MOOCs for credit to students in its online master's program in computer science, is planning on using same technology as it expands its program.

Computer grading isn't a new process. In the online education and online tutoring world, for instance, several learning management systems are equipped to grade objective and true-false tests. Automated essay grading, thus, is another creature altogether – and a very divisive one.

Computer essay grading has been more accepted in school level education, where it's used for high-stakes testing. So far most online students have not had to face it in their class, though that would be changing, experts say.

"Part of it is a marketing issue. Higher ed does not have the market demand that K-12 does," says Mark D. Shermis. "As the technology becomes more complicated there will be a higher acceptance, but it's going to take various years for it to work its way through higher ed."

Automated essay grading uses AI to grade student essays and short written answers. The technology typically needs human instructors to train the software by grading anywhere from 100 to 1,000 essays.

From there, the software basically mimics the instructor, scoring the essays on a rubric prepared by the teacher. The computer also provides students general comments about their work. In some instances, students are welcome to enhance their grade by trying to write another answer.

Advocates of the technology say online students should not fear the technology, which they believe a reliable tool that saves teachers time so they will focus on other things, such as planning engaging lessons or answering problems. They cite studies denoting that computer grading is just as dependable as human grading and argue that teachers will forever overrule the computer if they disagree with a grade.

The software will also save schools money, they say.

Some kind of computer-assisted grading is essential in classes that enroll hundreds of students, ​says senior associate dean for the college of computing at Georgia Tech, which plans on using computer grading technology to improve the peer grading that occurs in its MOOCs. ​

"The major cost of these things, online classes where people have to be graded for credit, is grading," he says.​ "As the number of students increase, you have to hire more and more of these people. If you want to keep the cost down –​if you want to make the degree affordable –​the apparent way of doing that is with computer-assisted grading."

Automated essay grading positively has its critics, many of whom refute studies defending the technology and disagree that students will never get a really fair essay grade from a computer. For example, has taken more than 4,100 signatures protesting automated grading from educators and others across the other countries.

Shermis says his research has denoted that computer-assisted grading is just as effectual as human grading. Still, he admits the technology has bounty of room to enhance. In some instance, he says, student has been able to earn high grades by writing nonsense.

The technology also does not have a way of judging creativity, he adds. "There can be somebody out there who has come up with a brilliant solution but if it has not been predetermined it's going to be discounted. That’s a higher-order challenge but it's very significant."

The technology will be helpful to students and teachers alike if used properly. In his mind, professors would use the technology to scan essays for areas of weakness, freeing professors to read the work more intensely with a focus on enhancing students' critical thinking.