Automated Essay Scoring

Bridgeman, Trapani, and Attali (2009) pdf

• Automated scoring models for evaluating English essays, or e-rater
• E-Rater gave significantly better scores for 11th grade essays written by Hispanic students and Asian-American students than White students
• E-Rater gave significantly better scores for TOEFL essays (independent task) written by speakers of Chinese and Korean
• E-Rater correlated poorly with human rater and give better scores for GRE essays (both issue and argument prompts) written by Chinese speakers
• E-Rater system performed comparably accurately for male and female students when assessing their 11th grade essays, TOEFL, and GRE writings

Bridgeman, Trapani, and Attali (2012) pdf

• A later version of automated scoring models for evaluating English essays, or e-rater
• E-rater gave particularly lower score for African-American, and American-Indian males, when assessing written responses to issue prompt in GRE
• The score was significantly lower when e-rater was assessing GRE written responses to argument prompt by African-American test-takers, both males and females.

• E-rater gave slightly higher scores for test-takers from Chinese speakers (Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) and Korean speakers when assessing written responses to independent prompt in Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)
• E-rater gave slightly lower scores for Arabic, Hindi, and Spanish speakers when assessing their written responses to independent prompt in TOEFL
• E-rater gave significantly higher scores for test-takers from Mainland China than from Taiwan, Korea and Japan when assessing their GRE writings which tended to be below average on grammar, usage, and mechanics but longest response

• The score difference between human rater and e-rater was marginal when written responses to GRE issue prompt by male and female test-takers were compared
• The difference in score was significantly greater when assessing written responses to GRE argument prompt, as e-rater gave lower score for male test-takers, particularly for African American, American Indian, and Hispanic males, when assessing written responses to GRE argument prompt

Ramineni & Williamson (2018) pdf

• Revised automated scoring engine for assessing GSE essay

• E-rater gave African American test-takers significantly lower scores than human raters when assessing their written responses to argument prompts
• The shorter essays written by African American test-takers were more likely to receive lower scores as showing weakness in content and organization

Wang et al. (2018) pdf

• Automated scoring model for evaluating English spoken responses
• SpeechRater gave a significantly lower score than human raters for German
• SpeechRater scored in favor of Chinese group, with H1-rater scores higher than mean