In fact "it will help us develop more effective instructional materials for improving reading, writing and other communication abilities. Furthermore, according to Hearst (2000) using computers to increase our understanding of the textual features and cognitive skills involved in the creation and in the comprehension of written texts, will provide a number of benefits to the educational community. A system for automated assessment would at least be consistent in the way it scores essays, and enormous cost and time savings could be achieved if the system can be shown to grade essays within the range of those awarded by human assessor. "So, if we want to free up that 30% (worth 3 billion UK Pounds/year to the taxpayer by the way) then we must find an effective way, that teacher will trust, to mark essays and short text responses." This issue may be faced through the adoption of automated assessment tools for essays. According to Mason (2002), about 30% of teachers' time in Great Britain is devoted to marking. Furthermore essay grading is a time consuming activity. Many researchers claim that the subjective nature of essay assessment leads to variation in grades awarded by different human assessors, which is perceived by students as a great source of unfairness. One of the difficulties of grading essays is the subjectivity, or at least the perceived subjectivity, of the grading process. It is in the measurement of such outcomes, corresponding to the higher levels of the Bloom's (1956) taxonomy (namely evaluation and synthesis) that the essay question serves its most useful purpose. Learning outcomes implying the ability to recall, organize and integrate ideas, the ability to express oneself in writing and the ability to supply merely than identify interpretation and application of data, require less structuring of response than that imposed by objective test items (Gronlund, 1985). Most researchers in this field agree on the thesis that some aspects of complex achievement are difficult to measure using objective-type questions. multiple choice, multiple answer, short answer, selection/association, hot spot and visual identification (Valenti et al., 2000). Most of those tools are based on the use of the so-called objective-type questions: i.e. According to our findings (Valenti, Cucchiarelli, & Panti., 2002) more than forty commercial CbAS are currently available on the market. The interest in the development and in use of Computer-based Assessment Systems (CbAS) has grown exponentially in the last few years, due both to the increase of the number of students attending universities and to the possibilities provided by e-learning approaches to asynchronous and ubiquitous education. Abstract: Introduction Assessment is considered to play a central role in the educational process.
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