E-Readers used to grade essays?

 Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously

This article in the New York Times caught my eye immediately.  There is a computer developed that can be used to electronitcally grade essays without the need of a human!  As an English teacher, one of the forms of assessment I would be using would be essays, but what would be the point of having teachers if a computer could grade the work for them? I was immediately skeptical about the E-rater as it is called, because an essay is not black or white.

Upon reading further, I discovered that, "the substance of an argument doesn’t matter...as long as it looks to the computer as if it’s nicely argued."  The student could completely lie, saying something along the lines of "King Kong climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower; however, because of his great size, he was required to take the elevator to accommodate for the weight."  The sentence is grammatically correct, and complex.  To the trained teacher's eye, the sentence is nonsense, but to the E-rater, the sentence is literary genius.

The reason the E-rater is getting so much attention is because it "can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds."  A little ridiculous if I may say so myself.  The E-rater may be efficient, but it is not appropriate to use, especially when trying to teach students how to appropriately write.  The E-rater can give feedback on craft, but not on content, because it cannot measure the facts.  I wanted to post this summary and analysis of this article because I think this is a great example of how using discretion when incorporating technology into the classroom is beneficial.  As a future educator, I cannot see myself being a proponent of such a technology, especially while it is not perfected.