The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is a standard school exam. Most Massachusetts students sit it. This year, about 1,400 essays got bizarrely wrong scores and had to be reassessed. Y…

This year, about 1,400 essays got bizarrely wrong scores and had to be reassessed. You guessed it — a contractor scored them with AI!

The contractor, Cognia, got $36.5 million this year to mark essays, and they did that by just throwing them into the chatbot…

How did the contractor get caught out on this year’s disaster? One third-grade teacher went and checked her students’ essays and saw the bizarre scores. She alerted her principal, who sent it up to the district. In the end, 1,400 essays got remarked.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
      111·
      24 days ago

      Really? Writing essays that had introductions, bodies, and conclusions were what we had to do in 3rd grade. That’s also the year I believe we had to start writing them in cursive. Then we started submitting them typed in 4th or 5th.

      I doubt they really had to be 5 paragraphs but the books we were supposed to be reading were over 100 pages and don’t have pictures at that point.

      Being able to write a short story shouldn’t be all that hard, granted you will spell shit wrong and have poor sentence structure, but that’s how you learn.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
      4·
      24 days ago

      The essays won’t be good but yeah 3rd graders should be able to write a paragraph or two on an age appropriate topic

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
      41·
      24 days ago

      Eh? Third graders have a decently large vocabulary and can express complex thoughts and ideas. I doubt we’re talking 800±word essays, but 200 words? Maybe two paragraphs? They can totally put short essays together.

      Source: I have an 8-year-old who is admittedly pretty verbose, but her classmates can do this stuff too

      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
        1·
        24 days ago

        If your 8-year-old can write coherent, well-structured paragraphs then I’d say she’s precocious. I’ve worked with high school students who can’t do that.

    • elevenbones@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      18·
      24 days ago

      It says 1400 essays were scored wrong, doesn’t say how many essays they had total. It doesn’t say that all that money was from the same school.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
        7·
        24 days ago

        Looks like there are about 921,180 public school K-12 students in Massachusetts (at least as of 2021-2022). If they all sat the test, that’s about $40 per test. But state standardized testing in my state is only administered in, like, five grades; so probably closer to $80 per test. And that’s generous, because kids don’t have to take it every year if they passed it the previous year, and they also alternate some subjects year to year.

        In any case, even $80 is definitely enough that, if I lived in Massachusetts, I’d assume a human was looking at each essay. Insist, even.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        7·
        24 days ago

        If they were scored by an AI, chances are that way more than just 1400 were scored wrong, but that this has not yet been uncovered.