Abstract:
What happens when a computer marks your essay.
A recent ‘New York Times’ headline, ‘Essay Grading Software Offers Professors a Break’, encapsulates the tensions underlying universities today. The era of mass higher education has reached crisis point. Large numbers of students still enrol in tertiary education but universities claim they are starved of sufficient resources to support them. Meanwhile institutions chase commercial research funding or focus on research productivity to advance in university league tables. All too often in this drive for research the role of face-to-face teaching is downplayed as the focal point of university life. The possibility of automated grading allows a further de-skilling of university teaching. It also ushers in problems for academics similar to those facing the rest of the middle class as their jobs are increasingly outsourced or their creative activity is replicated cheaply by machines. Thus the ‘break’ professors are granted is in actuality a threat: produce more research or face a more permanent kind of break.
Details / PDF:
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