Note: The accompanying slide deck contains a more detailed summary of the project.
The problem of scoring essays by computer is decades old, and of increasing relevance (and controversy) as test providers use these in lieu of human readers. In this project, I use a dual-input RNN to build a simple essay scorer, which achieves 62% accuracy against a 36% baseline. A more complex scorer could achieve greater accuracy by incorporating independent spelling and grammar checks, or checking prompt relevance using word-vector similarity.