Dive Brief:

• With more demands, through the Common Core, that student writing stretch across all subjects, many districts are turning to automated essay graders to save educators time.
• District Administrator profiles districts which have successfully used digital grading services, such as Placentia Yorba Linda USD and Portland Public Schools.
• The Common Core is not the only incentive for using these automated scorers. Testing consortiums like PARCC have also employed digital graders. Last March PARCC gave a practice writing exam to a million public school students with the intention of using the responses as a way to "train" an automated essay-scoring tool.

Dive Insight:

The District Administrator piece is generally very glowing. Last June Maja Wilson, author of “Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment,” wrote a piece for the Washington Post in which she asserted that automated essay scoring machines miss the nuances of language (such as sarcasm) and therefore are an ineffective and unfair choice for the grading of high-stakes exams.

Wilson argued that emotional intelligence is necessary to accurately assess an essay.