A while back we told you about a computer program that had the preliminary ability to grade written assignments such as essays.  Findings at that time indicated the technology was far from producing an accurate evaluation of student writing.

Most recently, a study concluded that these programs have advanced to automatically read and grade as well as, (or even better than), a teacher.

Conducted at the University of Akron, the study ran 16,000 middle and high school essays through the software.  The essays had already been graded by teachers.  The findings?  The computer scoring returned nearly identical accuracy levels, with an actual increase in consistency over human grading.

How does a computer program grade an essay, you might ask.  In short, by many of the same techniques a human teacher would use to evaluate one.  Word usage, sentence structure, syntax and subject-verb agreements are scanned to determine the grammatical accuracy of the writing.

Whether or not the context is correct is something the readers need improvement evaluating, according to those related to the study.

To read more about this new technology, click here.