LLMs can Perform Multi-Dimensional Analytic Writing Assessments: A Case Study of L2 Graduate-Level Academic English Writing

The paper explores the performance of LLMs in the context of multi-dimensional analytic writing assessments, i.e. their ability to provide both scores and comments based on multiple assessment criteria.Using a corpus of literature reviews written by L2 graduate students and assessed by human experts against 9 analytic criteria, we prompt several popular LLMs to perform the same task under various conditions.To evaluate the quality of feedback comments, we apply a novel feedback comment quality evaluation framework.This framework is interpretable, cost-efficient, scalable, and reproducible, compared to existing methods that rely on manual judgments.We find that LLMs can generate reasonably good and generally reliable multi-dimensional analytic assessments.We release our corpus and code 1 for reproducibility.