Computers Can grade CSAP

Officials at Vantage Learning of Newtown, Pa., said the Graduate Management Admission Council chose the company to provide computer-based essay scoring for the Analytical Writing Assessment portion of the GMAT, used by business colleges to judge prospective graduate students.Vantage, a division of Vantage Laboratories Inc., was selected by ACT Inc., the not-for-profit organization that manages the development of the GMAT, to be used in conjunction with humans to develop prompts and to score the …

…like to think of it as the computer is verifying the human, the computer is an amalgamation of a lot of humans reading the essay," said Larry Rudner, vice president of research and development at GMAC. "It's a form of quality control. If the program's score differs from a human's score by more than one point, it goes to arbitration and a senior human scorer sets the grade. That should pretty much end that argument."