Human and Computer-Generated Essay Grades

The advent of computerized essay grading brings with it significant questions about the interaction between the grader and the student. An experiment is presented that compares two forms of human essay grading with computerized essay grading. Twenty human graders using either holistic or analytic grading methods marked 15 student essays. These essays were subsequently marked by computer using a grading implementation of latent semantic analysis. There were significant correlations between both holistic and analytic graders and the computerized essay grader.