No Mark for Style with new system
by Susan Hewit

FORGET worrying about markers who just don't understand you they may soon be replaced by heartless computers.
Curtin University of Technology researchers claim to have invented a marking system which can judge a whole class of papers based on one perfect answer.
There are no marks for relevant or sassy quotes, none for clever jokes or perfect penmanship.

The system calculates your words on whether they appear in a thesaurus, determines them against a set of nouns then breaks them all down into a mathematical formula that is compares with one answer.
It doesn't care that much about grammar and it sends shivers down the spines of English teachers.

"There are two groups of people," developer and Curtin lecturer Rob Williams said. "They think it's terrific or they are sure they don't want their essays marked by computer.
"I ask them why they are quite happy about letting a computer fly them in a plane at 30,000 feet but not so sure about letting them mark their exam."

Mt Williams' system, MarkIT, was tested on law and ionformation technology papers.
It marked the papers slightly higher than human markers but lower than an American program, which differed in that 200 papers were fed into it and collated to mark new essays.