Investigating the Suitability of Implementing the e-rater® Scoring Engine in a Large-Scale English Language Testing Program

Since its 1947 founding, ETS has conducted and disseminated scientific research to support its products and services, and to advance the measurement and education fields. In keeping with these goals, ETS is committed to making its research freely available to the professional community and to the general public. Published accounts of ETS research, including papers in the ETS Research Report series, undergo a formal peer-review process by ETS staff to ensure that they meet established scientific and professional standards. All such ETS-conducted peer reviews are in addition to any reviews that outside organizations may provide as part of their own publication processes. Peer review notwithstanding, the positions expressed in the ETS Research Report series and other published accounts of ETS research are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Officers and Trustees of Educational Testing Service. Abstract In this research, we investigated the suitability of implementing e-rater ® automated essay scoring in a high-stakes large-scale English language testing program. We examined the effectiveness of generic scoring and 2 variants of prompt-based scoring approaches. Effectiveness was evaluated on a number of dimensions, including agreement between the automated and the human score and relations with criterion variables. Results showed that the sample size was generally not sufficient for prompt-specific scoring. For the generic scoring model, automated scores agreed with human raters as strongly as, or more strongly than, human raters agreed with one another for more than 97% of the prompts. The impact of substituting e-rater for the second human rater made no practically important impact on test takers' scores at both the item and total test score levels. However, neither automated scoring models nor human raters performed invariantly across all prompts or across different test countries/territories. Further investigation indicated homogeneity in the examinee population, possibly nested within test countries/territories as one potential cause of this lack of invariance. Among other limitations, findings may not be generalizable beyond the examinee population investigated in this study.