For predicting and improving the quality of essays, text analytic metrics (surface, syntactic, morphological, and semantic features) can be used to provide formative feedback to the students in higher education. In this study, the goal was to identify a sufficient number of features that exhibit a fair proxy of the scores given by the human raters…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

The present study explores two rating methods for peer assessment (analytical rating using criteria and comparative judgement) in light of concurrent validity, reliability and insufficient diagnosticity (i.e. the degree to which substandard work is recognised by the peer raters). During a second-year undergraduate course, students wrote a one-page…

One of the challenges in scoring constructed-response (CR) items and tasks is ensuring that rater drift does not occur during or across scoring windows. Rater drift reflects changes in how raters interpret and use established scoring criteria to assign essay scores. Calibration is a process used to help control rater drift and, as such, serves as…

E-learning is gradually gaining prominence in higher education, with universities enlarging provision and more students getting enrolled. The effectiveness of automated essay scoring (AES) is thus holding a strong appeal to universities for managing an increasing learning interest and reducing costs associated with human raters. The growth in…

Employing G-theory and rater interviews, the study investigated how a high-stakes writing assessment procedure (i.e., a single-task, single-rater, and holistic scoring procedure) impacted the variability and reliability of its scores within the Turkish higher education context. Thirty-two essays written on two different writing tasks (i.e.,…

This study investigates the validity and reliability of generative large language models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT and Google's Bard, in grading student essays in higher education based on an analytical grading rubric. A total of 15 experienced English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors and two LLMs were asked to evaluate three student…

In this Brief Report, we describe an evaluation of and revisions to a rubric adapted from the Jacobs et al.'s (1981) ESL COMPOSITION PROFILE, with four rubric categories and 20-point rating scales, in the context of an intensive English program writing placement test. Analysis of 4 years of rating data (2016-2021, including 434 essays) using…

This article investigates the feasibility of using automated scoring methods to evaluate the quality of student-written essays. In 2012, Kaggle hosted an Automated Student Assessment Prize contest to find effective solutions to automated testing and grading. This article: a) analyzes the datasets from the contest -- which contained hand-graded…

This article presents an empirical evaluation of the validity and reliability of a peer-assessment activity to improve academic writing competences. Specifically, we explored a large group of psychology undergraduate students with different initial writing skills. Participants (n = 365) produced two different essays, which were evaluated by their…

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students' development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, "Reflection";…

Automated essay scoring (AES) has emerged as a secondary or as a sole marker for many high-stakes educational assessments, in native and non-native testing, owing to remarkable advances in feature engineering using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep-neural algorithms. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness…

In this article, I report on examiners' views and experiences of using Pairwise Comparative Judgement (PCJ) and Rank Ordering (RO) as alternatives to traditional analytical marking for GCSE English Language essays. Fifteen GCSE English Language examiners took part in the study. After each had judged 100 pairs of essays using PCJ and eight packs of…

The literature on using scoring rubrics in writing assessment denotes the significance of rubrics as practical and useful means to assess the quality of writing tasks. This study tries to investigate the agreement among rubrics endorsed and used for assessing the essay writing tasks by the internationally recognized tests of English language…

Studies on automatic scoring systems in writing assessments have also evaluated the relationship between human and machine scores for the reliability of automated essay scoring systems. This study investigated the magnitudes of indices for inter-rater agreement and discrepancy, especially regarding human and machine scoring, in writing assessment.…