ALISON FRANK JOHNSON

Arlington, Mass., April 5, 2013

The writer is a professor of history at Harvard University.

Image Credit... Tane Williams

To the Editor:

Your article left this former journalism professor with an enormous sense of sadness. The sadness was not so much for the students writing their earnest essays for only machines to read, but for their teachers.

What kind of university professors are these, who spend a semester teaching their students how to think, and how to express those thoughts in written English, and then don’t even care to read what those students have to say? To teach, and then to learn nothing from your students? Not to discover, through their writings, how your own future teaching can improve? Not even to have the intellectual curiosity to wonder what they’ve learned from you? Pathetic.

RON BONN

San Diego, April 5, 2013

To the Editor:

On Sunday nights I would rather be anywhere but at my desk facing a stack of student essays. Still, I question the arguments offered in support of automated essay scoring.

The chief selling point of electronic assessment is that it gives instant feedback. This allows students to rewrite their essays immediately (and to keep resubmitting them) in hopes of getting a better grade until, as Daphne Koller, a founder of Coursera, puts it, “they get it right.” Learning, in Ms. Koller’s words, “turns into a game.”