This post is a simple comparison between Bard and Bing Chat as a tool facilitating writing assessment for those self-studying.
Yesterday, while waiting for my students being “tortured” to complete an IELTS writing task 2 essay for nearly an hour, I decided to try to be in their shoes by forcing myself to finish this writing in well over 20 minutes.
The question was, “Young people learn good behavior more from movies and books than real–life experiences. To what extent do you agree or disagree?”
My cursive writing was pretty bad, and some mistakes were corrected after a while by some of my students and coworkers, so I typed the “better” version into the chat box, asking both Bard and Bing Chat to give me some feedback based on the criteria in the IELTS Writing Task 2 band descriptor.
Below is what I got from Bing Chat:
The super fast speed of responding from Bing Chat amazed me as I felt like I got an instant reply, right after I hit the ENTER button. However, that swiftness may have compensated for such general feedback, which was gratuitous. From a learner’s perspective, this evaluation didn’t live up to my expectations.
And this is my conversation with Bard:
To be honest, my highest writing band score in IELTS is only 7.5 now, so I hope that I will soon reach (far) beyond Bard’s evaluation =))) I don’t think what Bard told me was sugar-coated but a nice encouragement to try harder.
Reading my screenshots, you may see the dissimilarities in how these two virtual assistants give comments. There are three main features that I think Bard is superior to Bing Chat even though the former is a little slower:
- Estimation: Maybe Bing Chat plays it safe by providing very general comment without indicating any figures related to the test score (like me in real life =)))))))), while Bard didn’t hesitate to mark my writing based on the official writing task 2 band descriptor.
- Evidence: I like the way Bard pointed out my strengths and weaknesses in the writing along with evidence from the text, making it sound more convincing.
- Suggestion: This is what every student expects from their instructor as they need to understand how they can improve to better their performances later.
Much as these two look marvelous, do you notice any fatal problems with these 2 chatbots?
I’ve spotted one. If I or anyone else spots other points, I’ll update this post later. The thing is, both Bard and Bing Chat weren’t given the question to which my writing answers. So, how could they accurately assess the relevance?
In short, thank you for reading and have a nice day ^^
brillbro 