Many Syracuse University students endure the time-consuming struggle to refine their persuasive, expository and narrative writing skills in the writing labs of Huntington Beard Crouse Hall.

But for students in more than 200 school districts and colleges across the country, the Criterion Online Writing Evaluation has become a vital tool, providing immediate feedback on their writing.

The service, to which schools can subscribe, lets teachers focus less on correcting and more on guiding students through their research and analysis, said Rich Swartz, president and chief executive officer of ETS Technologies, which provides the service.

‘Folks find it very useful because it makes it possible for writing teachers to provide the practice that writers need without allowing time for correcting and feedback,’ Swartz said.

To use the system, students write an essay and send it to the program. A computer scoring system, called e-rater, analyzes the essay, focusing on parts of speech, sentence structure and vocabulary and, within 30 seconds, sends the essay back with a grade and feedback on how to improve the writing. A student can submit an essay an unlimited number of times.

‘In a traditional setting, you write the essay, hand it in and have a conversation with the teacher, and it’s very time-consuming and labor-intensive,’ Swartz said. ‘Here the feedback is immediate, and the writer can see the rewards from the revision activity much more easily.’

Despite the online program’s popularity, many writing teachers are wary, especially because the program stresses convenience and immediacy.

‘When these programs say, ‘Look at all the labor that can be saved,’ what it really is is a drastic reduction of learning,’ said Rebecca Howard, associate professor of writing and rhetoric at SU. ‘Writing is not independent of readers and context, and writers need to know how they affect various readers in various contexts.’

A teacher’s grading can vary, and many students find this frustrating. This could explain their attraction to automatic grading systems where each essay is graded in a standardized method, Howard said.

‘But writers need to put up with their frustrations because that is what makes them a better writer,’ Howard added.

Still, some students prefer the traditional teacher-and-student interaction of reading and feedback.

‘I prefer to have a teacher over a computer program,’ said Sammi Halpern, a freshman speech communications and rhetorical studies major who is currently taking WRT 105. ‘I don’t think I’d learn enough from a computer program than I would from a person.’

Syracuse University does not use Criterion, and neither Swartz nor Howard know of any plans to adopt such a program.

‘We were contacted a few years ago I believe about it, but we didn’t want to take part of it – we just didn’t want the software,’ Howard said.

Program creators analyzed the scores of human-graded sets of essays and determined the characteristics of essays that achieved high scores as well as those that received low grades. They then designed the program to take those characteristics and assign corresponding scores similar to what a human grader would give, Swartz said.

‘We made models for each particular topic, and each topic we score is built on a model based on human-reader scores,’ he added.

Howard said that programs that substitute reader-and-writer interaction with a software program are very dangerous, but ETS Technologies said that the best use of the program is when students use Criterion for practice only and then have their instructors read over their papers.

‘It’s a supplement, not a replacement,’ Swartz said.

While students may or may not benefit from such programs, writing instructors also face potential drawbacks.

‘Students are going to look at a machine’s grading and then at a teacher’s grading, and if the machine gives a higher grade, then they could think teachers don’t know how to grade,’ Howard said. ‘But what they’re really doing is giving them their evaluation, based on how they interpreted the work.’

Howard also said that because many schools wish to save money on writing programs, online versions could prompt the hiring of additional non-tenured faculty or even increase the workloads of current teachers.

Writers at elementary and high school levels garner the most advantages from the program because they are less proficient in the technical aspects of their work, Swartz said. Undergraduate programs that want to boost analytical writing skills, however, can benefit from several of Criterion’s specific topics.

‘Some kids might think it’s more convenient, less of a hassle, but I don’t have any interest in it,’ Halpern said.

Published on September 7, 2003 at 12:00 pm