At the end of each term, as you pass your harried colleagues in the hall, there’s likely a common cause for your collectively frazzled state: the stack of papers (or digital file folder of papers) that awaits your grading. They loom there, at the corner of your desk, in the middle of your table at home, or in that desktop folder, and you can feel their mental baggage as you hustle through the rest of your end-of-the-quarter tasks.

Grading writing is hard. It takes time and thoughtfulness on your part, and even if you calculate how many hours of grading you have ahead of you (perhaps trying to limit yourself to 30 minutes per paper, knowing full well that your students [hopefully] spent far more time than that writing the paper), you’ll still be reading papers at all hours, struggling with eye strain and red ink visions and mental exhaustion because if you see ONE MORE comma splice…

All of this is what makes the concept of automated grading at least tempting. The justifications for software grading systems come to mind with alarming ease: What if the software could alert me to trouble areas, so that I can look at those either first (or last, depending on grading style)? Or, what if the software could just take care of all of the low-hanging fruit – grammar, syntax, etc. – so I could focus my grading time on the content of the students’ ideas? At some point, around 2:00 am, my grading likely becomes a little fuzzy, and wouldn’t it be helpful to have the software’s assessment as a second “set of eyes”?

But the teacherly part of your brain can kick in just as quickly: A machine certainly can’t provide the substantive feedback that I do for my students. Writing isn’t an automated process at any level, and it would be wrong to impose automation on the assessment end. A software program might read as an error a students’ deliberate misuse of punctuation or capitalization or unique syntax for effect. Etc., etc., etc.

I’ve been following this debate for awhile, but it’s picked up steam recently, with the expansion of Common Core and the improvement of these essay grading softwares. I was prompted to revisit the topic with the release of the revisions that are coming to the SAT, which seem to take into account how problematic both test-situated writing and automated scoring can be, most notably by making the essay optional.

Some of the kudos for this change are attributed to Dr. Les Perelman, a retired MIT professor who created Babel, or Basic Automated B.S. Essay Language Generator. (B.S., indeed.) Dr. Perelman and his team was able to combat automated assessment with automated writing: after typing in a few key words, Babel will generate text that would be scored favorably by the SAT standards, no matter how dense or, in one case, obscene.

The debate around this issue falls cleanly into two camps: the professional organizations who denounce grading software, and those who must rely on automated grading because of scalability issues. One side sees automated grading as a necessary (only somewhat) evil, and the other sees all the problematic layers, from the rigidity of such a system to issues of power and access.

My own take is even surprising to me. Of course, I find it reprehensible that high-stakes tests are graded in a way that we know is problematic. But, for the everyday grader, something like this could be helpful, if integrated effectively. I’m generally in favor of technology that makes teachers’ lives easier because more often than not, teachers will use that gained time to do something richer and more impactful with their students. In fact, most faculty I work with seem to have a tinge of guilt when a tech tool makes something easier because teaching is hard work! As it should be!

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a solution for those end-of-the-quarter grading blues, other than to promise yourself coffee throughout and an extra treat when you finish, but I’m hopeful that the SAT’s recent change is symptomatic in a shift in thinking about software-assisted grading: it doesn’t work for high-stakes, decontextualized writing, but if used for a specific purpose and in context, eventually, it could be a helping hand for that stack of papers.