INVENTIVE TESTING: What's the best way to test what you know? A. Multiple choice tests B. Essays C. Interviews D. None of the above.
Go ahead: argue with the premise of the question. Oh yeah, you can't do that on multiple-choice tests. Essays can often better gauge what you know. Writing is integral to many jobs. We don't demand students write on standardized tests, however, because it's daunting to even imagine grading millions of essays. On Monday, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation said it is creating a $100K competition for software that can "reliably automate" grading essays on state tests. Tom Vander Ark's Open Education Solutions is helping run the project; here's Tom's take. It's a two-part challenge: in part one, 8 current vendors have a chance to demonstrate just how well their current software works by automatically grading a set of 25,000 essays. Part two: anyone can play, in a competition hosted on Kaggle. Kaggle already hosts a $5K competition started by Grockit to develop software that predicts whether a student will answer the "next" question correctly; more than 100 teams have registered to compete. Check out our longer piece on the Hewlett prize in FastCompany this week.