Electronic scoring of essays: Does topic matter?

The scoring of student essays by computer has generated much debate and subsequent research. The majority of the research thus far has focused on validating the automated scoring tools by comparing the electronic scores to human scores of writing or other measures of writing skills, and exploring the predictive validity of the automated scores. However, very little research has investigated possible effects of the essay prompts. This study endeavoured to do so by exploring test scores for three different prompts for the ACCUPLACER®WritePlacer®Plus test which is scored by the IntelliMetric® automated scoring system. The results indicated that there was no significant difference among the prompts overall; among males, between males and females, by native language or in comparison to scores generated by human raters. However, there was a significant difference in mean scores by topic for females.