Hewlett Foundation offering $100,000 for design of automated essay grader

That's ridiculous. Essays are already being shoe-horned into the 3-paragraph/introduction/conclusion format and (I believe) it's quite harmful to budding writers.<p>An automated system of marking will mean two things:<p>1. Students will write more essays because they can be marked faster but... 2. The increased quantity will dictate an even more strict "style".

Hmmm.... more information here: <a href="http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes" rel="nofollow">http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes</a>. There are three awards: 1st: $60,000, 2nd: $30,000, and 3rd: $10,000.<p>The award level seems low even though "[E]ach team maintains full, exclusive and absolute rights to their intellectual property".

I suspect that any truly adequate automated essay grader would imply strong AI or at the very least some optimization process good enough that it might as well be strong AI.

<p><pre><code> ... to gage students’ work ... </code></pre> Really? "gage"? This is an academic blog ...