Explaining the Grade: Auto Essay Scoring and CRASE

Tech blog) published a critical article about automated essay scoring, "Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students' Essays." The story notes that: "research from psychometricians -- professionals who study testing -- and AI experts, as well as documents obtained by Motherboard, show that these tools are susceptible to a flaw that has repeatedly sprung up in the AI world: bias against certain demographic groups." The bias problem is not restricted to essay scoring and arises from the tendency of artificial intelligence to amplify patterns from data, in this case the human graders that train the essay scoring engines. In this episode of ACTNext Navigator podcast, we'll go under the hood of ACT's automated essay scoring engine, CRASE (Constructed Response Automated Scoring Engine). Our guests are Erin Yao and Scott Wood.