|
Writing Assessment
Who are these readers anyway?
You essays will initially be read by：
A) captains of industry
B) leading business school professors
C) college TAs working part time
The second reader of your essays will be a computer. That well-known arbiter of creative writing and syntax, a software program called the “E-rater”, will read and grade your essay.
How much time do they devote to each essay?
The human graders get two minutes, tops. They work in eight-hour marathon session(nine to five, with an hour off for lunch). The humans are each required to read thirty essays per hour. Obviously, these poor graders do not have time for an in-depth reading of your essay. They probably aren’t going to notice how carefully you thought out your ideas, or how clever your analysis was. Under pressure to meet their quota, they are simply going to be giving it a fast skim. By the time your reader gets to your essay, she will probably have already seen over a hundred-and not matter how ingenious you were in coming up with original ideas, she’s already seen them.
The computer grader, of course, takes even less time. It scores your essay by comparing it to other essays on the same topic. In the other words, if you actually did come up with an original point, the computer not only wouldn’t recognize it-it would probably penalize you for not coming up with one of the more obvious points it was programmed to find.
What ets doesn’t want you to know
The most successful essays had one thing in common.
l Good organization
l Proper diction
l Noteworthy ideas
l Good vocabulary
l Sentence variety
l Length
l Number of paragraphs
[此贴子已经被作者于2005-7-1 3:17:37编辑过] | 
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2005-7-1 03:14:00
