Speaker 1: It's Monday, November. I'm Oscar Emeras from the Daily Dive
Speaker 1: podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America for
Speaker 1: all those parents with kids doing remote learning this year,
Speaker 1: pay attention to your children's grades. In some cases, the
Speaker 1: autograding software used to grade quizzes and schoolwork are getting
Speaker 1: it wrong. If a student's answers don't match exactly what's
Speaker 1: in the teacher's answer guide, it can be marked wrong,
Speaker 1: even if it's just a capitalization discrepancy. Julie Jargon, family
Speaker 1: and tech columnists at The Wall Street Journal joins us prout.
Speaker 1: These auto grading systems are causing some headaches. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us, Julie, Thanks for having me. I wanted to
Speaker 1: check in on how everything is going with all this
Speaker 1: remote learning that's going on right now because of that pandemic. Julie,
Speaker 1: you actually wrote an article about how in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, bots are grading the schoolwork and quizzes for
Speaker 1: a lot of students in some of these online classrooms,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times they're actually getting it wrong.
Speaker 1: They're marking answers that are right incorrectly, and it has
Speaker 1: to do with very simple type of corrections. But either way,
Speaker 1: kids are coming home with lower grades things like that,
Speaker 1: and then parents on the flip side have to contact
Speaker 1: teachers and try to get everything squared away. Julie, help
Speaker 1: us walk through some of what's happening. I only discovered
Speaker 1: this because my son, who's doing remote pole, he studied
Speaker 1: really hard for a science exam. He expected to do
Speaker 1: well I thought you would do on it, and then
Speaker 1: we found out he had a very low grade on it.
Speaker 1: So I just opened into the test online to see
Speaker 1: the questions he'd missed, and I found several questions where
Speaker 1: he did answer the question correctly, but he was marked
Speaker 1: wrong because his answer that they typed in contained capital letters,
Speaker 1: where the way the teacher input it into the answer
Speaker 1: key it was lower case. So there were several things
Speaker 1: like that that I discovered between him and my other
Speaker 1: kids when I went back to kind of look at
Speaker 1: what was going on here, and then I also create
Speaker 1: a bunch of other parents to see if they were
Speaker 1: discovering similar issues, and they were, Yeah. It's like when
Speaker 1: you're entering a password for your email logging or something,
Speaker 1: and it always says don't forget the password is case sensitive,
Speaker 1: so you have to type in the exact upper case
Speaker 1: and lower case combination the right way, and that's exactly
Speaker 1: what was happening. You even had a few screenshots in
Speaker 1: your article about what was going on, and one of
Speaker 1: the questions was something about certain plants have special tissues
Speaker 1: that move sugar, water and minerals between plant parts. And
Speaker 1: the answer is vascular plants. But when the teacher inputs
Speaker 1: the answer, you know, she had a capital V for
Speaker 1: vascular and then a lower case P for plants, and
Speaker 1: if you put it, I think in the example here,
Speaker 1: both the V and the P were capitalized and because
Speaker 1: of that they got the answer wrong. So tell us
Speaker 1: about what online system that they were using there, and
Speaker 1: a little bit more about how these answers are inputed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was actually an example from my son's tested
Speaker 1: the screenshot of that. Menis teacher went back in what
Speaker 1: they told him and gave the point for it. So
Speaker 1: he and my other kids are using their school stricts
Speaker 1: to using a system called Canvas, which is pretty one
Speaker 1: of the big online school platforms a lot of districts
Speaker 1: and colleges are using. There's another educational software company called
Speaker 1: Otis that also has auto graded as a feature in
Speaker 1: online classroom So what they are doing is they are
Speaker 1: relying on these kind of autograding systems, which were I
Speaker 1: think build as a way to save teachers time. But
Speaker 1: what it's doing instead in many cases is requiring teachers
Speaker 1: to then go back manually through all of these tests
Speaker 1: for all of their students and make sure that they're
Speaker 1: getting credit for the answers that they do are down correctly.
Speaker 1: I want to give one more example, because these are
Speaker 1: very simplistic. I mean, if somebody was grading this manually,
Speaker 1: you can see where they would get it right. What
Speaker 1: happens when magnets come in contact with other magnets. So
Speaker 1: the incorrect answer that was put in there was they
Speaker 1: pulled together or they repel, But the correct answer, as
Speaker 1: the teacher would have inputed it, was the attract or
Speaker 1: repel each other. So just these very little, minor, minor
Speaker 1: differences are causing kids to get the answers wrong on
Speaker 1: these quizzes and other schoolwork like that. So what has
Speaker 1: been the response by teachers and the company as well?
Speaker 1: Because you spoke to representatives from Canvas, the Canvas acknowledge
Speaker 1: that this is an issue. They said that they are
Speaker 1: aware of it and that in fact they frequently received
Speaker 1: questions about this and you know, complaints about it from teachers,
Speaker 1: and they're aware of it. They have a quiz system
Speaker 1: that kind of their older version of their quiz system
Speaker 1: that seventy of their customers are still using, and about
Speaker 1: eighteen months ago they began rolling out an upgraded quiz
Speaker 1: feature that will recognize answers when they are close enough
Speaker 1: to the answer that the teacher put in the quiz.
Speaker 1: So they are trying to make improvements overall to their
Speaker 1: online quizzing, but the majority of their of the customers
Speaker 1: are still using them the older version with these mistakes
Speaker 1: happening and its exact matchesn't And part of what they
Speaker 1: said too was that in the rush to do all
Speaker 1: the remote learning, teachers didn't have enough training also on
Speaker 1: how to do some of this, So they were also
Speaker 1: putting it on lack of training for teachers too. Obviously,
Speaker 1: school districts last spring and just were kind of caught
Speaker 1: off guard by the sudden switch. And while they did
Speaker 1: have more time over the summer to prepare for this fall,
Speaker 1: who's still a big learning curves I would imagine for
Speaker 1: teachers to learn the new systems, you know, the online grading.
Speaker 1: It's not just online grading, it's the whole platform of
Speaker 1: where you submit, where you post your assignments, where you
Speaker 1: have your zoom links for the kids classes. All of
Speaker 1: those things are kind of in one place, and that's
Speaker 1: a lot of to learn how to navigate. So it
Speaker 1: could very well be that, you know, in many cases,
Speaker 1: teachers didn't have enough time to fully understand that this
Speaker 1: could be a problem. I mean, I know some teachers
Speaker 1: are aware of it, others don't know about you know,
Speaker 1: because it's it's easy to miss if your student has
Speaker 1: one or two answers wrong. I mean, if the most
Speaker 1: of the quiz is multip choice and just a couple
Speaker 1: of writing answers, and they get those wrong, they're also
Speaker 1: going to be or maybe a CE on a test.
Speaker 1: You may not think that's anything to worry about, but
Speaker 1: if enough of those kind of add up, the student
Speaker 1: might get a family in grade versus a passing grade,
Speaker 1: or a C in a class instead of a B
Speaker 1: when they deserve that B or a day. And even
Speaker 1: some of the teachers you spoke you said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's taken them hours to grade these automatically graded quizzes,
Speaker 1: so you know, it just creates a big headache. So
Speaker 1: I'm glad to see that they're at least rolling out
Speaker 1: improvements to try to correct some of this stuff. But yeah,
Speaker 1: as a parent, you know you gotta watch out for
Speaker 1: this and bring it to the teacher's attention if something
Speaker 1: is a miss like that. Julie Jargon, family and tech
Speaker 1: columnist at The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much
Speaker 1: for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm oscar
Speaker 1: A Mirrors and this has been reopening America. Don't forget
Speaker 1: effort today's big news stories. You can check me out
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