Automated Essay Scoring

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a natural-language-processing task in which a computational model assigns scores to student-written essays across dimensions such as grammatical correctness, coherence, content richness, and organisation — replicating, at scale, what a human rater would do. The approach was formalised as a research field by Shermis and Burstein (2013) and has been transformed since 2019 by transformer language models, particularly BERT, which allow AES systems to leverage deep contextual representations of text.