Hewlett Foundation Sponsors Prize to Improve Automated Scoring of Student Essays

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced last week that they will award a $100,000 prize to the designers of software that can reliably automate the grading of essays for state tests. The software competition is intended to begin to solve the problem of the high cost and the slow turnaround resulting from the time consuming and expensive task of hand scoring thousands of essays for standardized tests. These obstacles typically mean that many school systems exclude essays in favor of multiple-choice questions, which are less able to assess students’ critical reasoning and writing skills. This is a wonderful contest, and is consistent with the current design of the NAAS EAS/N2 Multi-Purpose Automated System. Essays are already graded by the NAAS EAS/N2 Form 000 automated system.