Word: essay
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...strangest stories Fitzsimmons shares was of an applicant who wrote his essay with his foot. "He had his friend take pictures," Fitzsimmons says. The essay closed with the line, "I hope to leave a footprint in the sands of time." Really clever, eh? Another student, trying to get noticed, sent in a box of corrected papers--all of them since kindergarten actually. Students have tried everything-pictures of sword collections, diaries, letters of recommendation from the president, pictures with famous people, and all sorts of poems and anagrams...
...thing for a machine to determine whether a bubble has been correctly filled in, but can it read outside the lines, so to speak? Well, yes and no. E-Rater "learns" what constitutes good and bad answers from a sample of pregraded essays. Using that information, it breaks the essay down to its syntax, organization and content. The software checks basics like subject-verb agreement as well as recognizes words, phrases and sentence structures that are likely to be found in high-scoring essays. For example, an essay on Clinton's impeachment trial that includes terms like DNA and rule...
...unusual analogy."If I'm unique, I might not fall under the scoring rubric," concedes Frederic McHale, a vice president at the Graduate Management Admission Council, which owns the GMAT. On the other hand, E-Rater is mercilessly objective and never tires halfway through a stack of essays. The upshot: in pretrial tests, E-Rater and a human reader were just as likely to agree as were two readers. "It's not intended to judge a person's creativity," says Darrell Laham, co-developer of the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a computer-grading system similar to E-Rater...
...education at Teachers College of Columbia University. "Writing is a human act, with aesthetic dimensions that computers can only begin to understand." The Kaplan course, a leader in test prep, has taken a more pragmatic approach: it has issued a list of strategies for "the age of the computerized essay." One of its tips: use transitional phrases like "therefore," and the computer just might think you're Dickens...
...Objectivist Club (HOC) welcomes interested students to attend its weekly meetings, lectures and videotape viewings. Ayn Rand, mother of Objectivism, preached "objective reality, reason, rational self-interest and capitalism." According to HOC President Joseph C. Anderson `99, philosophical experience is helpful but not necessary for understanding guest lecturers and essay discussions. "One can still grasp Rand's meaning," notes Anderson, "without being an expert on continental philosophy or the English empiricists." Oh goodie. E-mail hoc@hcs.harvard.edu for meeting times and more information. Happy pondering...