Computer software scores the essay component of the GMAT and may soon do the same for the GRE – I can totally see test prep companies teaching students how to defeat this by writing simple, well-structured sentences and throwing in a few big words, with no regard for saying anything coherent.
Aside
I for one welcome our GMAT scoring overlords.
My high school used TurnItIn.com to provide a simple way to check for plagiarism in students’ essays — just pop in a MSWord document (you thought they’d accept any other format? — although now it appears that you can paste the contents into a form on the site) and it finds where you stole stuff from.
This is a simple use of computers to rate (to a certain extent) papers. The point I’m getting at is that this software didn’t quite work all the time. If I recall correctly, a paper of mine was flagged because I used the phrase “…the problem with this theory is that…”
Give me a professor or a teacher or at least a HUMAN (ok, maybe a chimp) over essay-grading software any day.
I once had a teacher who took the MCATs for fun… On his essay portion, he wrote the first paragraph, third paragraph, and fifth paragraph about something structured and MCAT-like, using the second and fourth to speak about cars and trolls. He ended up being in the high 90s of percentiles.