Computer marks US university course work
At the University of Missouri a program, Qualrus, is being used to mark essays of students taking sociology courses. It doesn’t replace the professor’s marking, but is used to give students preliminary feedback – they can submit their work online, and get a detailed evaluation of their essay within seconds. The program analyses word patterns in the essay and compares them to work submitted by all previous candidates and information added by the course tutors. Students may use Qualrus as many times as they like before submitting their papers.
The program was surprisingly cheap to develop – it cost around $100 000. And it sounds as if, with time and further development, it has the potential to completely change the way students learn. I wonder whether it also ultimately has the potential to trigger a technology race, similar to that between spammers and anti-spam software – with people developing software to help write course work which marking programs give high marks to?