Les Perelman Machine Always And Only Give Rewards

“Machines Always and Only Give Rewards”: Teaching Writing and Teaching Machines
In late September 2015, Les Perelman, the retired director of Writing Across the Curriculum at MIT and writing assessment rabble-rouser, sent an e-mail out to writing instructors, program administrators, and writing center directors across the country. He explained his previous stance on automated essay scoring and his discovery, at the National Writing Project conference, of WriteLab, a technology altogether different from the hordes of machine grading software and projects he had spent the past several decades publically criticizing. “I left [the conference] wanting to join them. Here’s why:”
WriteLab does not score student essays; it offers questions and suggestions
Donald McQuade, former Chair of the Committee on College Composition and Communication, English professor at UC-Berkeley, and previous Chair of the Board of the National Writing Project, was the Chief Learning Officer. Richard Sterling, Executive Director Emeritus of the National Writing Project and Education professor at UC-Berkeley was the Chair of the Advisory Board. Together, these three figures had left an important imprint on composition as a field of work and study. Perelman explained one reason for his change of heart: “A tool that uses machine learning to analyze writing is inevitable, and if the composition community doesn’t build it correctly, others will build it badly.” Less than a month later, Perelman sent a short e-mail to the Writing Program Administrators Listserv, the central online vehicle for composition community news.
For several reasons, some of which are personal constraints, I am no longer affiliated with
In 2014, he was hailed by the Boston Globe as “the man who killed the SAT essay,” after his public crusade to prove that SAT essay scoring was based on vacuous criteria. After reverse engineering scored essays, Perelman devised a guide for high school students to game the essay exam, prompting the College Board to make the essay “optional.” And Perelman not surprisingly attracted similar attention on behalf of WriteLab during his brief tenure as spokesman. In an early September interview also in the Boston Globe, writer Chris Berdik seemed suspicious. He asked, “Les, you’ve spent years arguing that computers can’t tell good writing from wordy nonsense. Why join a start-up offering automated writing instruction?” Perelman’s response mirrored his late September e-mail explanation, with a twist: “I’m making full disclosure. I have stock options in WriteLab. I am an interested party. But the reason I got involved in this venture, risking my reputation, is because if we don’t do it well, other people are going to do it