For the standardized test discussed in the article, it says the human graders gave three minutes, on average, to reading each essay. These tests are not wanting art. Writing one of these essays is no more art than writing a basic linked list implementation. It's not concerned with how good a writer a kid is, but that the kid can write at all.
Edit: basically, the sheer scale of the grading required for a standardized test means that it's never going to be a real test of writing skills. It wouldn't surprise me if overly skilled writing is actually a negative even with the human grader—I could easily see a rushed grader misreading something clever and giving it a low score.
(The wisdom or effectiveness of these tests in the first place is a whole different discussion.)
"Art" is not even a question - these tests typically apply to high school kids, and you're lucky if bare-bones basic communication is possible there. Most of these kids are straight-up idiots, and I say this having spent several years teaching them.
I'd guess that the algorithm "map number of Microsoft Word reported spelling errors from (0 -> 800) to (20 -> 400)" does a pretty damn good job of guessing students' SAT Writing scores. Add in a factor for essay length, unique word cound, and grammar errors, and you'd probably get pretty damn close to perfect, within a reasonable statistical tolerance.
Children don't produce art, almost all of them produce garbage, right up to the top 1%. Make no mistake, all that standardized tests aim to measure is how stinky the shit that they produce is. I'm fine with missing a bit of brilliance at the top; those students will do just fine anyways. It's ranking the relative crappitude of the middle that's important here, and I think the standard (if crappy) grading procedures do a pretty good job here.
>I'd guess that the algorithm "map number of Microsoft Word reported spelling errors from (0 -> 800) to (20 -> 400)" does a pretty damn good job of guessing students' SAT Writing scores.
The best part about that is the fact that people misspell words even with spellcheck! Come on, how hard is it to notice the squiggly lines and correct your error by picking the correct spelling from the drop down list?
And I wouldn't say what I produce is shit, but then I would have said that when I was twelve. And I mostly have to double time on projects and essays, so they probably are shit.
EDIT: And since losethos (Schizophrenic dude who's hellbanned.) asked, the boss; it's pretty clever to use someones tendency for pedantry against them.
Jaded much? Maybe I'm overly optimistic of the quality of students the school system produces? (I never went to high school, I took the GED and scored in the 100th percentile across the board and went directly to college at 16)
I'm sorry, but this is absurd, and it makes me very angry. If I got a whiff of this attitude from you as my teacher, you would not get an ounce of my respect as a student. Why should I spend time trying to produce good work to impress you if you've already decided that what I produce will be shit? If you take the ridiculous view that my attention to grammatical detail, essay length, and variety of vocabulary used are the most important things about my writing, and enough to determine my grade?
I say this as someone who graduated at the top of my high school class - if you can't get me to work hard for you, you're pretty screwed with the average student. It's no wonder that the stuff they wrote for you was crap.
Edit: basically, the sheer scale of the grading required for a standardized test means that it's never going to be a real test of writing skills. It wouldn't surprise me if overly skilled writing is actually a negative even with the human grader—I could easily see a rushed grader misreading something clever and giving it a low score.
(The wisdom or effectiveness of these tests in the first place is a whole different discussion.)