The future for essay grading isn’t looking too bright (or is, depending on how you look at it). This New York Times piece details the advancement of machine grading:

As essay-scoring software becomes more sophisticated, it could be put to classroom use for any type of writing assignment throughout the school year, not just in an end-of-year assessment. Instead of the teacher filling the essay with the markings that flag problems, the software could do so. The software could also effortlessly supply full explanations and practice exercises that address the problems — and grade those, too.

Tom Vander Ark, chief executive of OpenEd Solutions, a consulting firm that is working with the Hewlett Foundation, says the cost of commercial essay-grading software is now $10 to $20 a student per year. But as the technology improves and the costs drop, he expects that it will be incorporated into the word processing software that all students use.

As the article attests, it is still easy to game software by feeding in essays filled with factual nonsense that a human would notice instantly but software could not. For this reason, I hope the complete automation of grading isn’t left to the machines anytime soon.