Confident assessment of children's handwritten responses

This paper introduces a novel approach for the automatic assessment of children's responses to standardised English exam questions. The constrained nature of the question and answer medium is exploited to produce an automatic assessment mechanism that is both highly accurate and produces a reasonable level of response yield. It is shown that the novel approach can achieve 100% scoring accuracy on 44% of all responses compared to a traditional lexical approach that has an error rate of 41%. When a thresholding method, similar to that used in the novel approach is applied, the traditional approach can achieve an accuracy of 100% but with a response yield of only 5%. The approach introduced in this paper is thus shown to have a significant advantage over the traditional lexical based assessment.