Automated Essay Scoring

The impacts of computers on writing have been widely studied for three decades. Even basic computers functions, i.e. word processing, have been of great assistance to writers in modifying their essays. The research on Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has revealed that computers have the capacity to function as a more effective cognitive tool (Attali, 2004). AES is defined as the computer technology that evaluates and scores the written prose (Shermis & Barrera, 2002; Shermis & Burstein, 2003; Shermis, Raymat, & Barrera, 2003). Revision and feedback are essential aspects of the writing process. Students need to receive feedback in order to increase their writing quality. However, responding to student papers can be a burden for teachers. Particularly if they have large number of students and if they assign frequent writing assignments, providing individual feedback to student essays might be quite time consuming. AES systems can be very useful because they can provide the student with a score as well as feedback within seconds (Page, 2003). Four types of AES systems, which are widely used by testing companies, universities, and public schools: Project Essay Grader (PEG), Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), E-rater, and IntelliMetric. AES is a developing technology. Many AES systems are used to overcome time, cost, and generalizability issues in writing assessment. The accuracy and reliability of these systems have been proven to be high. The search for excellence in machine scoring of essays is continuing and numerous studies are being conducted to improve the effectiveness of the AES systems.