The robots are coming! The robots are coming!

I’m just reading a New York Times article,  Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break.  It’s one of those the-machines-can-do-it-better-than-you pieces.  In this case, the machines can grade student essays.  And students can do better too, if they give the machines what they want.  Forget originality, creativity, accuracy, thought.  Just give the machines what they have been programmed to look for, just fill in the boxes – and don’t ever think outside one?

If you do look at the NYT article, I wonder if you’ll get the same advertisements that I do? Mine includes an ad for WriteCheck (a sister to Turnitin, part of the same group):

Why oh why would I want to check for plagiarism?  I might want to check that I’ve got my citations and references right, I usually do, but that is something different, and WriteCheck cannot do that for me.

EasyBib, EdX, WriteCheck, Turnitin…  I think I might just turn to http://www.wetakeyourclass.com/ and cut out the middleman.  (Me.)

On second thoughts, not me. Life is too short to let someone else – or something else – live it for me.  I’ll do it myself, thank you.