A TOEFL Integrated essay: The Turing Test

This essay is in response to the integrated writing task in Model Test 2 of the Barrons TOEFL textbook, 14th edition. During the exercise, students read the reading passage for 3 minutes, after which they listened to part of a lecture on the same topic. We spent 2 minutes to jot down a quick outline, then we wrote for 20 minutes.

Students are encouraged to keep organization in mind. The thesis statement, which is essentially one's answer to the writing task, has to be clear, and each paragraph has to be unified.

ESSAY:

In this set of materials, the reading talks about the Turing Test, which is supposed to determine whether a computer is able to think, while the professor in the listening passage discusses the ability of the computer to answer questions but casts doubt on the idea that any computer can show intelligence even if it passes the test.

The Turing Test, described in the reading, is based on the idea that a computer is determined to be able to think if it can answer questions from a group of people without these people knowing that they were talking to a computer. The test involves the group of people typing or saying questions from one room and waiting for an answer from another room. The people asking the questions don't know whether they are talking to a person or a computer. If in the end, the group thinks that a person had been answering their questions or if they couldn't decide, the computer is said to have passed the Turing Test, which means that it is determined to able to think. Incidentally, no computer has met the challenge and passed the test.

In the listening, the professor questions the validity of the Turing Test by pointing out that a computer's ability to answer questions correctly has nothing to do with its intelligence but in its ability to access a huge reference to come up with the right answer. The professor uses an example of a monolingual English speaker who doesn't speak any Chinese and says that if this English speaker has to answer questions from the Chinese person, though he wouldn't be able to understand a word, if the English speaker had a database which he could refer to, it would in fact be possible for him to give a correct answer. The professor then explains that a computer could do the same thing and when a computer is able to answer correctly with the resources that it has, it would only be displaying its behavioral ability, not its intelligence. He also adds that, in this case, the computer would only be acting intelligent without being intelligent.


This sample essay was written by Joe Yu, ESL instructor, during the 20-minute writing exercise in class.