My Access

     As a part of my TESOL certification, I took a class on assessment about three years ago.  We evaluated the work of an online automatic essay grading program called my access.  While at first it seemed impressive, I soon found that I could never implement it in my own classroom.  However, all of my experience is based on work that is, to date, three years old, so I cannot not speak for how the program has changed in recent years.
     My ESL students became very frustrated with the program because, try as they might, they could almost never improve their scores, even when they followed the feedback the program gave them.  The program was very adept at finding major errors in their writing.  My experience with My Access demonstrated that one of the most critical aspects in obtaining good scores was length, at both the sentence and essay levels.  The program was based on algorithms that could look at sentence complexity, and the denotation of individual words, but was inept at determining meaning at the sentence level.  Therefore, a human rater always had to read an essay to make sure that it was on topic, especially for subtle errors. 
    For example, I composed an essay about the exercise habits of Americans.  I received an average score and I wanted to improve it.  In order to test the program, I went to another website and copied the instructions for a exercise and I pasted them in my essay.  They did not fit in any coherent matter.  However, when I submitted my essay, my score greatly increased.  I then when to another site that was not related to exercise at all and pasted part of a novel in my essay.  Much to my surprise, my score continued to rise. 
      While I am impressed with how far automatic grading has progressed, I still believe that only humans are essential in the assessment of essays, at least in the near future...