The e-rater engine of TOEFL writing is used to identify grammatical, usage and mechanical errors and measure vocabulary and sentence variety of the TOEFL writing essay prompts. Find out how TOEFL e-rater scoring engine works while grading the writing tasks of TOEFL.

TOEFL e-rater: An Overview

Researches by academic experts regarding the symbiotic relationship between the scores of TOEFL e-rater online and the human rater assess the extent of concord between the two scorers, the effect of the application of the e-rater engine on scores by demographic subgroup and lastly, the relationships of human and e-rater engine scores to independently indicate the language ability of the reader.

In their comprehensive research on the use of the e-rater engine for the TOEFL independent writing task, Enright and Quinlan (2010) reported that the e-rater engine has a high tendency to agree with the human raters as well as or better than human raters agree with each other when rating these essays. Thus, they propose that the e-rater basically complements the TOEFL Writing score assigned by the human raters.

Scholarly researches also illustrate that even in the TOEFL integrated writing tasks which involve summarizing and synthesizing of academic reading as well as listening materials, the e-rater engine complements the scores by the human.

Thus, attempting a maximal number of TOEFL writing samples is indispensable to your TOEFL writing preparation.

Features of the E-Rater

At the fundamental level, the TOEFL writing e-rater scores your essays by extracting a certain set of characteristics which indicate significant aspects of writing quality from each of the essays which predict the readers’ scores as well are logically symmetrical to the features that readers consider while awarding scores. Subsequently, the E-rater online free TOEFL combines these scores in a statistical model for developing a final score approximation, designed to maximize the concurrence with the scoring by the human rater.

The features considered by the TOEFL writing e-rater while assessing your TOEFL integrated writing essays along with independent ones include

• The proportion of grammar errors
• lexical complexity/diction
• organization and development scores
• content analysis based on vocabulary measures
• the proportion of usage errors
• features rewarding idiomatic phraseology
• the proportion of mechanics errors
• the proportion of style comments

To hone your essays skills, you can conveniently check out our TOEFL writing topics for independent tasks alongside the integrated ones.

Moreover, the weighting of features to ascribe a total score to a TOEFL essay is usually done so that the same e-rater model could be used again for assigning scores to a wide variety of other TOEFL writing prompts. The TOEFL e-rater assigns test scores to the students in particular categories called the macro-features, every single one which holds a different weight when it comes to final scoring (as illustrated in the following data table in the Handbook of Automated Essay Evaluation: Current Applications and New Directions):

Thus, the academic professionals advise making judicious use of the E-rater online free TOEFL to accomplish desired results.

Latest Modifications in TOEFL E-Rater

While going through the TOEFL writing samples, one must keep in mind the recent alterations in the TOEFL e-rater engine:

• A new macro-feature called “Sentence Variety” to measure the diversity of the sentence structure throughout the essay.
• The macro-feature of “Style” has been removed from the characteristic features of the e-rater.
• New sub-micro features have been included in the latest body of characteristics in the TOEFL e-rater online such as “Wrong part of speech”, “Extra comma” and “Determiner-noun agreement”.
• The grammar micro feature called “proofread this” has been altered to “multiple adjacent errors”.

We hope that after glancing through the aforementioned information in the article, you must have realised the significant characteristics of and relevant modifications in the TOEFL e-rater.