How international students should tackle the AWA and the E-rater.
The conventions for the AWA can be summarized in a single statement: written English requires that each paragraph be developed directly away from a topic (or thesis) sentence or directly towards a topic (or thesis) sentence. The former is known as deductive development; the latter is known as inductive development. Since this is the case for all English written prose it should be obvious that writers in English have less freedom to wander from the main point of their discourse than writers in other languages. English expository prose style must be direct and to the point even though it is necessary to support each main idea with examples, explanations, and illustrations. The thesis (or topic sentence) must contain the germ of the idea that permeates the entire paragraph. Each example or illustration must be connected to that idea with transitional markers such as for example, thus, or moreover.
The E-rater speaks "American."
Your essays should be written in "American", not "English". Phrases that are more commonly spoken in English (indeed, hence, etc..) are less common in an American writing style. Phrases that are commonly spoken in English are unlikely to be picked up by the E-rater, which picks up phrases used among high scorers (who are overwhelmingly American).
Students from the U.K., Hong Kong, India and other Commonwealth nations should adjust their syntax, style and language to better suit the flavor of English used in America. That is the language of the E-rater. Avoid any local jargon or particularly any unusual transitional phrases (e.g. "heretofore"). Got that mate? In addition, the human graders are overwhelmingly American and will have an easier time with arguments written in American.
Beware of words that have a non-American spelling:
"evidense" = evidence
"organisation"= organization
The best solution to writing in the appropriate style is to read all of our sample essays. You should also familiarize yourself with American scholarly journals to see how American writers structure arguments.
In light of the several talks that we've had recently about scoring essays and other free text response sections on tests, I came across this example of a poorly written essay that could get awarded a top grade from the E.T.S. e-Rater system.
The accompanying article notes the following flaws in the technology:
1. The e-Rater cannot decipher truth, so a student will not be penalized for writing that the War of 1812 started in 1945.
2. Longer essays (even if they are filled with nonsensical sentences) are awarded higher scores than shorter essays. The e-Rater also prefers long sentences to short.
3. When in doubt, using a big word in place of a smaller word increases one's score.
It's fascinating to see how far technology has evolved so that we can now use an algorithm to measure the quality and development of an argument -- and it's also interesting to see how much further there is to go before a computer scorer can fully replace a human grader.
作者: 普渡哥 时间: 2013-6-18 21:24
谢谢分享！作者: edisonjk 时间: 2013-6-30 07:35 it is useful to me.作者: Epersistence 时间: 2013-8-10 14:25
谢谢分享！！！作者: notwy 时间: 2019-3-17 10:43
感谢分享！
it is useful to me.