Computerised Grading, um...

Some interesting comments to this Slashdot story:

If grading is intended as a motivator to encourage each student to perform his/her best, then more effort should yield a higher grade. Likewise, if grading is intended to reflect the student's ability to perform in a real-world situation, effort should probably yield a higher grade: folks who work hard tend to do better than folks who are marginally smarter but don't work hard, in real-life situations. But if grading is intended to reflect only the quality of the work that was submitted, then sure -- effort shouldn't count at all.

And:

Cool idea. Imagine high school students re-writing their essays until the grader software gives them an A+.

This was exactly what we could do in one of my programming classes and it was excellent. We had a deadline, but could make as many submissions as we liked until we were happy with the grade. A nice subversive suggestion in there too:

it would have been my goal to make the most wrong essay I could that would still generate a good grade from the system.