State-of-the-art automated essay scoring: Competition, results, and future directions from a United States demonstration

This article summarizes the highlights of two studies: a national demonstration that contrasted commercial vendors' performance on automated essay scoring (AES) with that of human raters: and an international competition to match or exceed commercial vendor performance benchmarks. In these studies, the automated essay scoring engines performed well on five of seven measures and approximated human rater performance on the other two. With additional validity studies, it appears that automated essay scoring holds the potential to play a viable role in high-stakes writing assessments. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.