A: to get to the “does not compute.”

Bad news for those who want to apply completely automated, industrial processes to writing assessment! A recent UK experiment with computerized marking progrmas has given them a failing grade. The Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors recently put the computer marker through its paces by feeding it samples of essays written by the likes of Hemmingway and Churchill. The machine did not take kindly to the test and gave poor marks to some of the best writers of the 20th century. Not that this news is surprising, for computers are still fairly clumsy at natural language processing – just ask your grammar checker in MS Word. To imagine that highschool essays like those required in the British A-levels and CGSEs do not fall into the category of natural language is foolish. Foolish because in many of the rubrics designed to help teachers assess student writing at the highschool level – six plus traits, for instance – to demonstrate mastery, the student must break out of the mold of rigid formula. They must show spark by using metaphor, descriptive language, unconventional sentence structure, and all of the other things that set great writing apart from merely competent writing. How can a parser understand whether a metaphor works, or falls flat? How can a machine see the difference between stylish concision and lack of vocabulary?

COMARKER™ skates by this problem because from the beginning we understood that putting teachers and markers out of work was antithetical to the educational enterprise. Academic writing tests our ability to generate meaning from the disparate and the abstract and that is preceisely what the computer cannot yet generate or assess. So to generate feedback and authentic assessments and evaluations for students COMARKER™ relies on a more creative and intelligent system : human teachers.

We still need beta testers, so contact us if you want to help us make a system that improves on the shortcomings of full automation.

Open call for teachers to Beta-test Collaborative Essay Marking Software.

Teachers find themselves making the same comments on different essays all the time. Until now there has been no way to avoid this repetition. However, at Acovan Inc we have been hard at work trying to solve this problem for nearly two years now. Our solution is COMARKER ™, a web-based tool for evaluating essays. The application remembers all the comments you make on student essays and returns them to you efficiently and automatically on demand, so with COMARKER™ you will give great feedback and save time.

Autocomplete is a great step forward already, but just the beginning for COMARKER™. COMARKER™ also returns relevant results from other markers, making COMARKER™ the first mass collaboration among evaluators of text.

All the research shows that formative assessment improves learning outcomes, so we built COMARKER™ with those principles in mind. COMARKER™ handles multiple drafts of each document, giving students a chance to revise and edit their work before the marker evaluates it using our simple, interactive rubric. Students learn throughout assignments rather than just at the end when they receive their grade. You don’t have to mark multiple drafts, but COMARKER™ makes it easy if you do.

We built COMARKER™ for ourselves, but along the way we realized that we could all benefit from synergy in a wider collaboration. We have been testing COMARKER™ in our own private tutorial academy for one year now, making big improvements along the way.

What we need now are critical users to test the program and show us how we can improve it. Our mission is to make learning richer for students and marking easier for teachers. We need 150 educators for a two-semester trial of the program. We will set your classs up in the system, and as the trial progresses, we will ask you now and then for feedback (surveys, polls, etc.). Will you help us end the pain of marking for teachers everywhere? For additional information please visit our site, watch the videos, read the FAQ, then fill in the contact form to get started.

The COMARKER™ team.