Automated essay scoring

Automated essay scoring (AES) is the use of specialized computer programs to assign grades to essays written in an educational setting. It is a method of educational assessment and an application of natural language processing. Its objective is to classify a large set of textual entities into a small number of discrete categories, corresponding to the possible grades—for example, the numbers 1 to 6. Therefore, it can be considered a problem of statistical classification.

Several factors have contributed to a growing interest in AES. Among them are cost, accountability, standards, and technology. Rising education costs have led to pressure to hold the educational system accountable for results by imposing standards. The advance of information technology promises to measure educational achievement at reduced cost.

The use of AES for high-stakes testing in education has generated significant backlash, with opponents pointing to research that computers cannot yet grade writing accurately and arguing that their use for such purposes promotes teaching writing in reductive ways (i.e. teaching to the test).

Most historical summaries of AES trace the origins of the field to the work of Ellis Batten Page. In 1966, he argued for the possibility of scoring essays by computer, and in 1968 he published his successful work with a program called Project Essay Grade™ (PEG™). Using the technology of that time, computerized essay scoring would not have been cost-effective, so Page abated his efforts for about two decades.

By 1990, desktop computers had become so powerful and so widespread that AES was a practical possibility. As early as 1982, a UNIX program called Writer's Workbench was able to offer punctuation, spelling, and grammar advice. In collaboration with several companies (notably Educational Testing Service), Page updated PEG and ran some successful trials in the early 1990s.

Peter Foltz and Thomas Landauer developed a system using a scoring engine called the Intelligent Essay Assessor™ (IEA). IEA was first used to score essays in 1997 for their undergraduate courses. It is now a product from Pearson Educational Technologies and used for scoring within a number of commercial products and state and national exams.

IntelliMetric® is Vantage Learning's AES engine. Its development began in 1996. It was first used commercially to score essays in 1998.

...
Wikipedia