Australian education agency wants to have tests checked by computer
Australia may have written answers in a national education test checked by a computer. The ACARA education agency, which is in charge of implementation, wants to start working on it in 2017. Tests showed that the computer checked as well as humans.
The National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy has been administered in Australia since 2008. It is a standardized test that is being developed and reviewed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. Students in grades three, five, seven and nine take the test, which measures performance in reading, writing and math. In this way the progress of students is tracked; the information is also used for a website where people can see the performance of schools.
ACARA wants to automate the marking of written parts of the test. They are about two to three pages long. Teachers would first assess a thousand tests in detail. The assessments are then put into the computer, which uses machine learning to figure out what to give points for. ACARA director Stanley Rabinowitz told the Australian news site ITnews that the computer pays attention to grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and spelling.
According to Rabinowitz, previous tests with a computer rating system were successful. The scores the computer gave to tests previously graded by teachers were within the same range as the scores of a second human corrector. The distribution of the figures given was also equal to that of people.
When the program is entered, not all keys will be graded by a computer alone. Five to ten percent of the tests will be double-checked by human proofreaders. In addition, according to Rabinowitz, there will be tests with unusual answers that can be better viewed by people. It could automatically recognize the computer, after which a human still looks at it.
ACARA hopes that the automatic scoring system will allow the results to be known more quickly. The organization wants to introduce the computer assessment in 2017. However, there are no definitive plans for this yet.