S-GRADES -- Studying Generalization of Student Response Assessments in Diverse Evaluative Settings

Abstract

Evaluating student responses, from long essays to short factual answers, is a key challenge in educational NLP. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) focuses on holistic writing qualities such as coherence and argumentation, while Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) emphasizes factual correctness and conceptual understanding. Despite their shared goal, these paradigms have progressed in isolation with fragmented datasets, inconsistent metrics, and separate communities. We introduce S-GRADES (Studying Generalization of Student Response Assessments in Diverse Evaluative Settings), a web-based benchmark that consolidates 14 diverse grading datasets under a unified interface with standardized access and reproducible evaluation protocols. The benchmark is fully open-source and designed for extensibility, enabling continuous integration of new datasets and evaluation settings. To demonstrate the utility of S-GRADES, we evaluate three state-of-the-art large language models across the benchmark using multiple reasoning strategies in prompting. We further examine the effects of exemplar selection and cross-dataset exemplar transfer. Our analyses illustrate how benchmark-driven evaluation reveals reliability and generalization gaps across essay and short-answer grading tasks, highlighting the importance of standardized, cross-paradigm assessment.