Has Automated Essay Scoring Reached Sufficient Accuracy? Deriving Achievable QWK Ceilings from Classical Test Theory
Automated essay scoring (AES) is commonly evaluated on public benchmarks using quadratic weighted kappa (QWK). However, because benchmark labels are assigned by human raters and inevitably contain scoring errors, it remains unclear both what QWK is theoretically attainable and what level is practically sufficient for deployment. We therefore derive two dataset-specific QWK ceilings based on the reliability concept in classical test theory, which can be estimated from standard two-rater benchmarks without additional annotation. The first is the theoretical ceiling: the maximum QWK that an ideal AES model that perfectly predicts latent true scores can achieve under label noise. The second i...
| Authors | Masaki Uto |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 April 2026 |
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