Scoring models for the "e-rater"® system were built and evaluated for the "TOEFL"® exam's independent and integrated writing prompts. Prompt-specific and generic scoring models were built, and evaluation statistics, such as weighted kappas, Pearson correlations, standardized differences in mean scores, and correlations with…

Four writing samples were obtained from 638 foreign college applicants who represented three major foreign language groups (Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish), and from 60 native English speakers. All four were scored holistically, two were also scored for sentence-level and discourse-level skills, and some were scored by the Writer's Workbench…