Ⅲ.Reading comprehension (2*20) feNr!/
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America’s most relentless examiner, the Educational Testing Service, has developed computer software, known as E-Rater, to evaluate essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test. Administered to 200,000 business school applicants each year, the GMAT includes two 30-minute essays that test takers type straight into a computer. In the past, those essays were graded on a six-point scale by two readers. This month, the computer will replace one of the readers with the proviso that a second reader will be consulted if the computer and human-reader scores differ by more then a point. *sAoYx
It’s one thing for a machine to determine whether a bubble has been correctly filled in, but can it read outside the lines, so to speak? Well, yes and no. E-Rater “learns” what constitutes good and bad answers from a sample of pregraded essays. Using that information, it breaks the essay down to its syntax, organization and contents. The software checks basics like subject-verb agreement and recognizes phrases and sentence structures that are likely to be found in high-scoring essays. t~5>P
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Of course, the machine cannot “get” a clever turn of phrase or an unusual analogy. “If I’m unique, I might not fall under the scoring instructions,” concedes Frederic McHale, a vice president at the GMAT Council. One the other hand, E-Rater is mercilessly objective and never tired halfway through a stack of essays. The upshot: a pretrial tests, E-Rater and a human reader were just as likely to agree as were two readers. “It’s not intended to judge a person’s creativity,” says Darrel Laham, co-developer of the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a computer-grading system similar to E-Rater. “It’s to give students a chance to construct a response instead of just pointing at a bubble.” E'XFn'
That won’t reassure traditionalists, who argue that writing simply can’t be reduced to rigid adjective plus subject plus verb formulations. “Writing is a human act, with aesthetic dimensions that computers can only begin to understand,” says David Schaafsman, a professor of English education at Teachers Colleges of Columbia University. The Kaplan course, a leader in test prep, has taken a more pragmatic approach: it has issued a list of strategies for “the age of the computerized essay.” One of its tips: use transitional phrases like “therefore”, and the computers just might think you’re Dickens. 4LBjqv,P
51. E-Rater is described as __________. Esw&ScBOP