Computer examiner fails Churchill
Updated on 12 November 2009
A computer designed to mark A-level English exams has dismissed some of the the most famous passages in the English language as repetitive, lacking care and incomprehensible.
The Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors inputted some of the most famous passages of the century into the American programme system with some alarming results.
The Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors CIEA ran some of the most famous passages of the 20th century through the American programme and found that, just like a spell-checker, it can recognise sentence structure but finds style and purpose difficult to understand.
This passage from Hemingways The End of Something was criticised for "lack of care in style of writing" -
In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake.
William Golding's Lord of the Flies did not fare much better. The computer said this passage had an "inaccurate and erratic sentence structure" -
You could see a knee disturb the mold. Now the other. Two hands. A Spear. A Face.
And Winston Churchill's most famous speech was described as "too repetitive" and "below average" -
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the street.
Computers already mark some multiple choice GCSEs and there are moves to allow them to mark essay-style answers as they do in America.
But researchers there have found that some students have worked out how to work around the non-human marker by writing in a style the machine recognises as valid.
They call it "schmoozing the computer".
