Autograding short textual answers has become much more feasible due to the rise of NLP and the increased availability of question-answer pairs brought about by a shift to online education. Autograding performance is still inferior to human grading. The statistical and black-box nature of state-of-the-art machine learning models makes them…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) refers to the process of scoring free text responses to given prompts, considering human grader scores as the gold standard. Writing such essays is an essential component of many language and aptitude exams. Hence, AES became an active and established area of research, and there are many proprietary systems used in…