Low-income and black and Hispanic students tended to be in this latter category. “ (T)he use of the computer may have widened the writing achievement gap,” concluded the working paper, “ Performance ...

They’ll use the validity set to see if the software actually replicates the human scores. With that feedback in hand, SBAC will get its arms around the reliability of computer scoring.

Singer and Ivory, in their Nov. 4 New York Times article, made a major mis-speak: "... there is little rigorous evidence so far to indicate that using computers in class improves educational results." ...

Using computers instead of humans would certainly be cheaper, but not everyone agrees on argument No. 2. Les Perelman, director of the student writing program at MIT, is among the skeptics.

Because students can use these tools to handle some of the lower-level details of programming, it frees them to focus on bigger-picture questions that are at the heart of writing software programs.

Using a computer can be more convenient when working or just learning a topic. Both forms of writing have their pros and cons. I had 70 students participate in a survey in our school.