Develop an automated scoring algorithm for student-written essays.

Hewlett is appealing to data scientists and machine learning specialists to help develop fast, effective and affordable solutions for automated grading of student-written essays. A total of $100K in prizes on Kaggle platform.

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The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Hewlett) is sponsoring the Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP) on Kaggle. Hewlett is appealing to data scientists and machine learning specialists to help solve an important social problem. We need fast, effective and affordable solutions for automated grading of student-written essays.

Hewlett is sponsoring the following prizes:

• $60,000: 1st place
• $30,000: 2nd place
• $10,000: 3rd place

You are provided access to hand scored essays, so that you can build, train and test scoring engines against a wide field of competitors. Your success depends upon how closely you can deliver scores to those of human expert graders. While we believe that these financial incentives are important, we also intend to introduce top performers both to leading vendors in the industry and/or an established base of interested buyers. Hewlett is opening the field of automated student assessment to you. We want to induce a breakthrough that is both personally satisfying and game-changing for improving public education.

Today, state departments of education are developing new forms of testing and grading methods, to assess the new common core standards. In this environment the need for more sophisticated and affordable options is vital. For example, we know that essays are an important expression of academic achievement, but they are expensive and time consuming for states to grade them by hand. So, we are frequently limited to multiple-choice standardized tests. We believe that automated scoring systems can yield fast, effective and affordable solutions that would allow states to introduce essays and other sophisticated testing tools. We believe that you can help us pave the way towards a breakthrough. ASAP is designed to achieve the following goals:

• Challenge developers of automated student assessment systems to demonstrate their current capabilities.
• Compare the efficacy and cost of automated scoring to that of human graders.
• Reveal product capabilities to state departments of education and other key decision makers interested in adopting them.

The graded essays are selected according to specific data characteristics. On average, each essay is approximately 150 to 550 words in length. Some are more dependent upon source materials than others. This range of essay type is provided so that we can better understand the strengths of your solution. It is our intent to showcase quality and reliability, based on how well you can match expert human graders for each essay.

To learn more and to participate, visit www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes