Essay -granding Software Officers Professors a Break
[A] Imagine taking a college exam, and instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professoer a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. And then, instead of being done with the exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.
[B] Edx,the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Thnology(MIT) to offer courses on the Internet ,has just introduced such a system and will make its automated(自动的)software available free on the Web to any institutioons that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
[C] The new service will bring the educational consortium(联盟)into a growing conflict over the role of the automation education. Altough automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet provided widespread acceptance by educations and has many critics.
[D] Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of Edx, predicted that the instant grading software would be a useful teaching tool,enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of
their answers . He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.“Thers is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr.Agarwal said, “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”
[E] But skeptics(怀疑者)say the automated system is no matter for live teachers. One longtime critic, Les Perelman，has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies claiming that the software compares well to human grades.
[F] He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition(呼吁) opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from famous people like Noam Chomsky.
[G] “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read’. They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical (伦理)position, convincing argument, meaningful organization, and clarity, among others.”
[H] But EdX experts its software to be widely by schools and universities. It offers free online classes from Harvard, MIT and the University of
California-Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Geogetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools.
[I] The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders 100 essay or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantly. The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical (数字的) rank.
[J] Edx is not the first to use the automated assessment technology, which dates to early computers in the 1960s. there is now a range of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers, and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia — are using some form of the technology in second schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader”, to check the reliability of the human graders.
[K] But the growing influence of the Edx consortium to set standards is likely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that it would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that will make use of the automated assessment technology.
[L] Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty
members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “it allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating (吸引) to ward resubmitting the work until they get it right, ” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.
[M] Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 Prizes aimed at improving software that grades essay and short answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner of one of the Hewlett contents, Vik Paruchurt was hired by EdX to help design its assessment software.
[N] “One of our focus is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests”. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot of more time.
[O] Mark D.Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings.
[P] With increasing large class, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said Plus, he noted,
critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of teaching is much better than at most schools.
[Q] “Often they come from very famous institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine over could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
46 Some professors in education are collecting signatures to voice their opposition to automated essay grading.
47 using software to grade students’ essay saves teachers time for other work.
48 the Hewlett contests aim at improving essay grading software.
49 Though the automated grading system is widely used in multiple-choice tests, automated essay grading is still criticized by many educators.
50 Some people don’t believe the software grading system can do as good a job as human graders.
51 Critics of automated essay scoring do not seem to know the true realities in leses famous university.
52 Critics argue many important aspects of effective writing cannot measured by computer rating programs.
53 As class size grows, most teachers are unable to give student valuable comments as to how to improve their writing.
54 The automated assessment technology is sometimes used to double check the work of human graders.
55 Students find instant feedback helps their learning considerably.
Section C
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B),C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the center.
Passage One
Question 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.
Across the rich world, well-educated people increasingly work longer than the less-skilled. Some 65% of American men aged 62-74 with a professional degree are in the workforce, compared with 32% of men with only a high-school certificate. This gap is part of a deepening divide between the well-education well
off and the unskilled poor. Rapid technological advance has raised the incomes of the highly skilled while squeezing those of the unskilled. The consequences, for individual and society, are profound.
The world is facing as astonishing rise in the number of old people, and they will live longer than ever before. Over the next 20 years the global population of those aged 65 or more will almost double, from 600 million to 1.1 billion. The experience of the 20th century, when greater longevity (长寿)translated into more years in retirement rather than more years at work, has persuaded many observers that this shift will lead to slower economic growth, while the swelling ranks of pensioners will create government budget problems.
But the notion of a sharp division between the working young and the idle old misses a new trend, the growing gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Employment rates are falling among younger unskilled people, whereas older skilled folk are working longer. The divide is most extreme in America, where well-educated baby-boomers (二战后生育高峰期出生的美国人) are putting off retirement while many less-skilled younger people have dropped out of the workforce.
That even the better-off must work longer to have a comfortable retirement. But the changing nature of work also plays a big role. Pay has risen sharply for the highly educated, and those people continue to reap rich rewards into old age because these days the educated elderly are more productive than the preceding generation. Technological change may well reinforce that shift: the skills that
complement computers, from management knowhow to creativity. Do not necessarily decline with age.
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
56、what is happening in the workforce in rich countries?
A. younger people are replacing the elderly
B. well-educated people tend to work longer
C. unemployment rates are rising year after year
D. people with no college degree do not easily find work
57、what has helped deepen the divide between the well-off and poor?
A. Longer life expectancies
B. Profound changes in the workforce
C. rapid technological advance.
D. A growing number of well-graduated.
58、what do many observers predict in view of the experience of the 20th
century?
A. Economic growth will slow down.
B. Government budgets will increase.
C. More people will try to pursue higher education
D. There will be more competition in the job market.
59、What is the result of policy changes in European countries?
A. Unskilled workers may choose to retire early.
B. more people have to receive in-service training.
C. Even wealthy people must work longer to live comfortably in retirement.
D. People may be able to enjoy generous defined-benefits from pension plans.
60、What is characteristic of work in the 21st century?
A. Computers will do more complicated work.
B. More will be taken by the educated young.
C. Most jobs to be done will be creative ones.
D. Skills are highly valued regardless of age.
Passage Two
Questions 61-65 are based on the following passage.
Some of the world’s most significant problems never hit headlines.One example comes from agriculture. Food riots and hunger make news. But the trend lying behind these matters is rarely talked about. This is the decline in the growth in yields of some of the world’s major crops.A new study by the University of Minnesota and McGill University in Montreal looks at where, and how far, this decline is occurring.
The authors take a vast number of data points for the four most important crops: rice, wheat corn and soybeans(大豆). They find that on between 24% and 39% of all harvested areas, the improvement in yields that tood place before the 1980s slowed down in the 1990s and 2000s.
There are two worrying features of the slowdown. One is that it has been particularly sharp in the world’s most populous(人口多的) countries, India and China. Their ability to feed themselves has been an important source of relative stability both within the countries and on world food markets. That self-sufficiency cannot be taken for granted if yields continue to slow down or reverse.
Second, yield growth has been lower in wheat and rice than in corn and soyabeans. This is problematic because wheat and rice are more important as foods, accounting for around half of all calories consumed. Corn and soyabeans are more important as feed grains. The authors note that “we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars rather than on crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world.”
The report qualifies the more optimistic findings of another new paper which suggests that the world will not have to dig up a lot more land for farming in order to feed 9 billion people in 2050, as the Food and Agriculture Organisation has argued.
Instead, it says, thanks to slowing population growth, land currently ploughted up for crops might be able to revert(回返)to forest or wilderness. This could happen. The trouble is that the forecast assumes continued improvements in yields, which may not actually happen.
注意:此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
61.What does the author try to draw attention to?
A)Food riots and hunger in the world. C)The decline of the grain yield growth.
B)News headlines in the leading media. D)The food supply in populous countries.
62.Why does the author mention India and China in particular?
A)Their self-sufficiency is vital to the stability of world food markets.
B)Their food yields have begun to decrease sharply in recent years.
C)Their big populations are causing worldwide concerns.
D)Their food self-sufficiency has been taken for granted.
63.What does the new study by the two universities say about recent crop improvement efforts?
A)They fail to produce the same remarkable results as before the 1980s.
B)They contribute a lot to the improvement of human food production.
C)They play a major role in guaranteeing the food security of the world.
D)They focus more on the increase of animal feed than human food grains.
64.What does the Food and Agriculture Organisation say about world food production in the coming decades?
A)The growing population will greatly increase the pressure on world food supplies.
B)The optimistic prediction about food production should be viewed with caution.
C)The slowdown of the growth in yields of major food crops will be reversed.
D)The world will be able to feed its population without increasing farmland.
65.How does the author view the argument of the Food and Agriculture Organisation?
A)It is built on the findings of a new study.
B)It is based on a doubtful assumption.
C)It is backed by strong evidence.
D)It is open to further discussion.
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