The paper attempts to give an overview of evaluation in higher education institutions with particular emphasis on the faculties of humanities, education and social sciences disciplines at the University of Eswatini (Swaziland) in Southern Africa. It describes the general methodology of evaluation and identifies obstacles and relevant strategies…

For the last century, the quality of large-scale assessment in the United States has been undermined by narrow educational theory and hindered by limitations in technology. As a result, poor assessment practices have encouraged low-level instructional practices that disparately affect students from the most disadvantaged communities and schools.…

This article outlines the current state of and recent developments in the use of corpora for language assessment and considers future directions with a special focus on computational methodology. Because corpora began to make inroads into language assessment in the 1990s, test developers have increasingly used them as a reference resource to…

Automated essay scoring can produce reliable scores that are highly correlated with human scores, but is limited in its evaluation of content and other higher-order aspects of writing. The increased use of automated essay scoring in high-stakes testing underscores the need for human scoring that is focused on higher-order aspects of writing. This…

Automated essay scoring programs are becoming more common and more technically advanced. They provoke strong reactions from both their advocates and their detractors. Arguments tend to fall into two categories: technical and principled. This paper argues that since technical difficulties will be overcome with time, the debate ought to be held in…

The hierarchical rater model (HRM) recognizes the hierarchical structure of data that arises when raters score constructed response items. In this approach, raters' scores are not viewed as being direct indicators of examinee proficiency but rather as indicators of essay quality; the (latent categorical) quality of an examinee's essay in turn…

In this paper, we provide an overview of psychometric procedures and guidelines Educational Testing Service (ETS) uses to evaluate automated essay scoring for operational use. We briefly describe the e-rater system, the procedures and criteria used to evaluate e-rater, implications for a range of potential uses of e-rater, and directions for…

Contrary to previous research on sequential ratings of student performance, this study found that professional essay raters of a large-scale standardized testing program produced ratings that were drawn toward previous ratings, creating an assimilation effect. Longer intervals between the two adjacent ratings and higher degree of agreement with…

Essay scores generated by machine and by human raters are generally comparable; that is, they can produce scores with similar means and standard deviations, and machine scores generally correlate as highly with human scores as scores from one human correlate with scores from another human. Although human and machine essay scores are highly related…

This paper examines the construct measured by automated essay scoring (AES) systems. AES systems measure features of the text structure, linguistic structure, and conventional print form of essays; as such, the systems primarily measure text production skills. In the current state-of-the-art, AES provide little direct evidence about such matters…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has garnered a great deal of attention from the rhetoric and composition/writing studies community since the Educational Testing Service began using e-rater[R] and the "Criterion"[R] Online Writing Evaluation Service as products in scoring writing tests, and most of the responses have been negative. While the…

This article presents considerations for using automated scoring systems to evaluate second language writing. A distinction is made between English language learners in English-medium educational systems and those studying English in their own countries for a variety of purposes, and between learning-to-write and writing-to-learn in a second…

In this article, the author describes his project to take every standardized exam English majors students take. During the summer and fall semesters of 2012, the author signed up for and took the GRE General Test, the Praxis Content Area Exam (English Language, Literature, and Composition: Content Knowledge), the Senior Major Field Tests in…

This article describes and reviews the Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Advanced Level General Paper (GP) examination. As a written test that is administered to preuniversity students, the GP examination is internationally recognised and accepted by universities and employers as proof of English competence. In this article, the…

The use of timed, essay examinations is a well-established means of evaluating student learning in higher education. The reliability of essay scoring is highly problematic and it appears that essay examination grades are highly dependent on language and organisational components of writing. Computer-assisted scoring of essays makes use of language…