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  3. America’s most relentless examiner, the Educational Testing Service, has developed computer software, known as E-rater, to eval

America’s most relentless examiner, the Educational Testing Service, has developed computer software, known as E-rater, to eval

admin2013-02-04  52
问题      America’s most relentless examiner, the Educational Testing Service,  has developed computer software, known as E-rater, to evaluate essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test. Administered to 200,000 business school applicants each year, the GMAT includes two 30- minute essays that test takers type straight into a computer. In the past, those essays were graded on a six-point scale by two readers. This month, the computer will replace one of the readers with the proviso that a second reader will be consulted if the computer and human-reader scores differ by more than a point.
     It’s one 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 contents. The software checks basics like subject-verb agreement and recognizes phrases and sentence structures that are likely to be found in high- scoring essays.
     Of course, the machine cannot "get" a clever turn of phrase or an unusual analogy. "If I’m unique, I might not fall under the scoring instructions," concedes Frederic McHale, a vice president at the GMAT Council. On the other hand, E-Rater is mercilessly objective and never tired 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. "It’s to give students a chance to construct a response instead of just pointing at a bubble."
   That won’t reassure traditionalists, who argue that writing simply can’t be reduced to rigid adjective plus subject plus verb formulations. "Writing is a human act, with aesthetic dimensions that computers can only begin to understand," says David Sehaafsman, professor of English education at Teachers Colleges of Columbia University. 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.
E-Rater is described as ______.
选项 A、a substitute for GMAT
B、America’s most relentless examiner
C、a machine to grade bubble-filling papers
D、a computer-grading system
答案D
解析
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