Overview
The Graduate Management Admission Council has long benefited from advances in automated essay scoring. In 1999, the Council’s flagship product, the Graduate Management Admission Test™ (GMAT™), became the first large-scale assessment to incorporate automated essay scoring. This paper provides an overview of the GMAT Analytic Writing Assessment and part of the results of an evaluation of the IntelliMetric™ Essay Scoring System of Vantage Learning. The system was proposed by ACT, Inc. as part of their bid to assume responsibility for GMAT test development and scoring in January of 2006. The evaluation is twofold. An initial evaluation examines the performance of IntelliMetric™ based on a sample of responses to six essays. A second evaluation is based on the comprehensive system reliability demonstration presented by Vantage to both ACT and GMAC. This second evaluation relies solely on comparisons to scores calculated by human raters, as such agreement would be the prime measure of performance during operational use of IntelliMetric™ in 2006.