And some professors, bogged down by the volume of student papers they must read, eagerly anticipate computerized readers that can help them slog through the volume of words that comes across their desks each semester.

"It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage the load associated with essay grading, and lecturers are gradually shifting the focus of their assessment to multiple-choice questions," says Chris Janeke, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of South Africa, a 120,000-student university experimenting with a computerized grading system called the Intelligent Essay Assessor. Software "offers the possibility of automatizing at least some aspects of essay grading and may present a technological solution to our logistic problems."

But hold on: If a student writes an essay that is graded by a computer, has it really been "read" at all? Well, sort of. A machine obviously can't comprehend a student's argument -- but it can determine whether a composition addresses a specific question, and it can judge an essay's structure. Electronic grading systems analyze hundreds of sample answers to a specific question (something like "Should a government be able to censor the media?"), then compare the content and semantic structure of the students' answers to the sample essays.

If this sounds like a lifeless way to examine a student's thoughtful writing, it is. But it's actually little different from the decades-old system that depends on people to grade the essay portion of standardized tests. Human graders, too, are required to read sample essays and judge student responses based on qualities prescribed by the testing service.

"The procedures are actually identical," says Fred McHale, vice president for assessment and research at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which developed E-rater. "Once the scoring rubrics are created by expert readers from the sample responses, those samples are used to train human readers -- or programmed into E-rater." (GMAT essays have been submitted electronically since 1997, so neither people nor software has to read handwriting.)

Every electronically graded essay still gets a second read by a real live human. Still, the notion that computers play any part in evaluating student essays hasn't gone down well with everyone in the academic community. "I think it's silly," says Dennis Baron, head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with an edge of derision. Computerized grading undermines the very purpose of essays, he adds. "Like the teacher says, 'I'm not just talking to hear myself talk.' We don't ask students to write just to have them jump through a hoop."

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