@Kim Davis, as would James Joyce for breaking multiple writing rules in Ulysses.

This reminds me that I have a very smart and tech-savvy friend who thinks having machines write successful pop tunes is just around the corner.  He thinks the algorithms are readily discoverable.  Does that sound plausible?

If so, I can believe that the machines could at least be successful in screening written texts for quality. Nicole is right, of course, that they are going to miss things which are deeply interesting, but not in a predictable or mainstream way. For better or worse, a Gertrude Stein would surely get an F.

@trvorh You've had some interesting experiencees. Do you know the name of the program your daughter was using? 

I remember having to completely reverse my thesis in an essay for an AP English class in order to get a good grade. I didn't really agree with what I had written, but my teacher did, so I got the 'A' I wanted.

Some of my kids are now being assigned to log in to a particular website to do their writing, and it grades them as they write. My daughter was trying to get a better grade, and enlisted my help as an editor. The more correct her writing became, the lower the score got. We finally just gave up.

@Joe When I worked as writing center tutor in colleges, students would boast of how they identified what they considered key to getting a better grade. I recall one student showing off his story (this was a writing exercise as a fable with a moral based on Beat Not the Poor Desk) in which a lioness argues for the right to join the male lions on the hunt. He thought he was being very clever in appealing to the teacher's feminist streak. He had no clue, of course, that, in fact, the lionesses are the ones who hunt, and the male lions usually stay back. Now, if he was being graded based on knowledge, he would lose points on that.  

I had a law professor whose exam I attempted to "game" by writing answers I didn't really believe in but would conform with her political opinions.

Not sure how well that worked; I wound up riding the curve.

Joe, I think we're in complete agreement.  All programs reflect the views and biases of their builders (hello, Tron).  Always have, always will.  But the amazing benefits of letting students build their writing skill with automated assistance are to be highly encouraged (there are never enough hours in the day for even the most talented teachers to give their students all the attention each requires).  I just hope the tools are used in the right mixture, as an aid rather than a crutch.  Oh, and just so you understand: I do believe my "exhibits" were just part of my education.  For every example like these, I can cite others, like the math TA who didn't laugh when I "re-discovered" Pascal's Triangle, or the Journalism prof who had me read my news copy from the college radio station in class so his students could see the difference between print and broadcast journalism.  I'll try to do a better job in the future of making my sense of irony more obvious.  And one final note: can't recall who had pointed out that students will learn to 'game' the device to boost their scores.  What, that hasn't already been done with professors?  Ariella's example of a prof giving a better grade because he supported the student's position is proof positive that this kind of 'gaming' has always been part of the process.  The more things change....

Compelling point about human frailties and biases, Duke, but that would seem to support the opposite point if you think about it -- because the computers are only as constant and unbiased as the humans who build and program them.

Indeed, linguistic sentiment analysis, while a VERY promising field, still isn't quite there yet in terms of picking up subtleties of human language (esp. things like irony and sarcasm).  For this reason, a creative, unique, poignant, extremely well-written, and otherwise spot-on student paper could be given a sub-par grade because it does not neatly fit the rubric that the machine is looking for.

Similarly, it seems to me that students, once they catch wise, would learn how to game the machines, writing merely what the machine is scanning for without actually putting much of substance or literary merit down on the paper.

The incidences of corruption you suffered academically are inexcusable, and I have my own tales I could tell, but I'm not sure our collective anecdotal evidence merits discarding the baby with the bathwater.

@mhhfive As an instructor, I've sometimes shared a student essay with the class, though due the defensive reaction one encounters, that is usually done for very good essays -- catching what they do right rather than pointing out what they do wrong. For the latter, you usually have to work with something not written by a student in the class because some people are so sensitive to criticism that they will not view it as constructive and may even feel publicly shamed. For a while it was popular to have students write in groups. Aside from the problems that Susan Cain points out with such set up in Quiet -- that groups stifle introverts altogether -- there could be the problem of the blind leading the blind because many may not be athe point when they can recognize what is correct or what makes a better constructed sentence or paragraph. Consequently, the teacher really has to direct things and point students in the right direction. That is difficult to do for each and every piece of writing in a class size that can easily exceed 20 students; in fact, it may be impossible given time constraints for the class.  So I can see the appeal of letting a computer take over the individualized response for the writing stages.

@Nicole, But what of the 9 publishers who passed on Harry Potter?  ertainly, to err is human, and that includes errors of assessment.That is not to say that a robo-reader would pick up on the fact that this story would spawn the biggest hit ever for children's books and films. In truth, these kinds of things are not altogether predictable because success does not depend on quality alone but on the convergence of favorable circumstances to bring the work to the public's attention at just the time when it has a taste for it.. It is possible that Harry Potter  may have had only modest sales if it had come out 20 years earlier, it would not have been the mega-hit it was. Steve Heley's  How I Became a Famous Novelist, which did not become that kind of hit, highlights the vagariesof the publishing industry and posits a writer gaming the system, as it were.