Predicting Misalignment Between Teachers' and Students' Essay Scores Using Natural Language Processing Tools

We investigated linguistic factors that relate to misalignment between students’ and teachers’ ratings of essay quality. Students (n = 126) wrote essays and rated the quality of their work. Teachers then provided their own ratings of the essays. Results revealed that students who were less accurate in their self-assessments produced essays that were more causal, contained less meaningful words, and had less argument overlap between sentences.