Abstract
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems are increasingly used to support teachers in managing grading workloads and to provide a supplementary rater in large-scale assessments. While human grading is frequently influenced by students' demographic characteristics, the efficacy of different strategies for integrating demographic metadata with textual input used to train AES models remains underexplored. This study investigates the impact of a specific multimodal fusion strategy - naive metadata concatenation - on the predictive accuracy, training convergence, and score parity of a DistilBERT-based AES model. A comparative analysis was conducted using the ASAP 2.0 dataset to evaluate a baseline model against an experimental model trained with input that concatenates tokenised text and demographic metadata using a naive multimodal fusion strategy. Evaluated via 10-fold cross-validation, the findings reveal that the early fusion of demographic metadata and the input significantly degrades the model's overall predictive accuracy. The baseline model achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 0.727, which dropped to 0.656 upon integrating metadata. Furthermore, the experimental model exhibited higher validation loss (1.29) compared to the baseline model (1.25). The experimental model also displayed exacerbated scoring bias, reducing score parity instances from 15 to 12 out of 19 tests.
Explore similar work
Apr 19, 2026cs.CL
Automated Essay Scoring (AES) faces significant challenges in cross-prompt settings, where models must generalize to unseen writing prompts. To address this limitation, we propose MAPLE, a meta-learning framework that leverages prototypical networks to learn transferable representations across different writing prompts. Across three diverse datasets (ELLIPSE and ASAP (English), and LAILA (Arabic)), MAPLE achieves state-of-the-art performance on ELLIPSE and LAILA, outperforming strong baselines by 8.5 and 3 points in QWK, respectively. On ASAP, where prompts exhibit heterogeneous score ranges, MAPLE yields improvements on several traits, highlighting the strengths of our approach in unified scoring settings. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential of meta-learning for building robust cross-prompt AES systems.
Salam Albatarni, May Bashendy, Sohaila Eltanbouly +1
Jul 30, 2026cs.CL
The majority of the recently-developed models for automated essay scoring (AES) are evaluated solely on the ASAP corpus. However, ASAP is not without its limitations. For instance, it is not clear whether models trained on ASAP can generalize well when evaluated on other corpora. In light of these limitations, we introduce ICLE++, a corpus of persuasive student essays annotated with both holistic scores and trait-specific scores. Not only can ICLE++ be used to test the generalizability of AES models trained on ASAP, but it can also facilitate the evaluation of models developed for newer AES problems such as multi-trait scoring and cross-prompt scoring. We believe that ICLE++, which represents a culmination of our long-term effort in annotating the essays in the ICLE corpus, contributes to the set of much-needed annotated corpora for AES research.
Shengjie Li, Vincent Ng
Jun 1, 2026cs.CL
In Automated Essay Scoring (AES), benchmarking practices have fostered minimalist evaluation practices, in contrast with the broader-view recommendations of evaluation frameworks, such as the argument-based validation framework (ABV), which argued in favor of a multidimensional assessment of systems, especially in the context of high-stakes language tests. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced and more practical version of the ABV framework, incorporating fairness analysis, correlations with linguistic features, prediction error evaluation, and model agreement compared with human raters. Applying this framework to French AES, we compare 8 model architectures on a corpus of 27k exam essays (2 raters each) and a generalization corpus of 961 essays (at least nine raters each). Our analyses illustrate the benefits of applying the ABV framework to better understand the capabilities and pitfalls of AES models, while also advancing the state-of-the-art for French AES.
Rodrigo Wilkens, Rémi Cardon, Vincent Folny +1