题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
甘肃省兰州市第一中学2018-2019学年高一下学期英语5月月考试卷
American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robot-readers—computers programmed to scan students' essays and spit out a grade.
Mark Shermis, professor of the College of Education at the University of Akron, is helping to hold a contest, set up by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (WFHF), which promises $ 100,000 in prize money to programmers who write the best automated grading software. "If you're a high school teacher and you give a writing task, you're walking home with 150 essays," Shermis said. "You're going to need some help."
Automated essay grading was first proposed in the 1960s, but computers back then were not up to the task. In the late 1990s, as technology improved, several textbooks and testing companies jumped into the field. Today, computers are used to grade essays on South Dakota's student writing assessments and a handful of other exams, including the TOEFL test of English fluency, taken by foreign students.
The Hewlett contest aims to show that computers can grade as well as English teachers—only much more quickly and without all that depressing red ink. "Automated essay scoring is objective," Shermis said. "And it can be done immediately. If students finish an essay at 10 pm, they will get a result at 10: 01 pm."
Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization, and help students to make revisions. The program scans for key words and analyzes semantic (语义的) patterns, and Pearson claims that it can understand the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.
My Favorite Sweater
By Bonnie Highsmith Taylor
My favorite sweater grew too small. I love that sweater best of all. My grandma made it when I was three. She made that sweater just for me.
I picked the yarn (纱线), a special blue. The color of bluebells (蓝色风铃花), wet with dew (露珠). When I was three I was very small. But now I'm five and much too tall.
I have a new jacket now that's green. So I gave my sweater to our cat Queen. Queen just gave birth to kittens in the shed (小屋). My favorite sweater is now their bed. |
试题篮