The PTE Academic now has human raters! I learned this in a webinar hosted by Pearson’s Jarrad Merlo. Moving forward, a human rater (or more than one?) will check all test taker responses to the “describe Image” and “retell lecture” questions.
Human raters will only grade responses in terms of content. Other features (pronunciation, etc) will still be graded entirely by AI.
Previously, human raters were only used when the AI scoring engine determined that responses were anomalous.
This change seems to be part of an effort to reduce the use of “templated responses,” a term that Jarrad used at least 37 times in the presentation.
The last part of the webinar discussed what is meant by “templated responses” in the context of the PTE, but I had to teach someone how to take (some other) test, so I missed it.
Below are some images, taken from the presentation, that demonstrate how this works. You can catch a replay of the webinar right here.
