Automatic assessment for situational writing questions in PSLE English paper

Abstract

As the world progresses, automation is fast becoming a norm. However, the task of marking and grading essays is still done manually by teachers due to its open ended-ness making it extremely difficult for automation. The process of marking these essays is both inefficient and time consuming. One part of essay writing in the Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) includes Situational Writing where students are given a situation and are tasked to write letters, reports amongst others to report on the given situation. This considerably narrows the scope of writing and gives rise to the possibility of automation. This project aims to study and improve on the existing techniques of automatically assessing a situational writing. Much of the research has been devoted into categorizing the possible common questions while employing a different algorithm when encountering more complex, question specific questions.