Automatically Scoring Tests of Proficiency in Music Instruction

We present preliminary work on automatically scoring constructed responses elicited as part of a certification test designed to measure the effectiveness of the test-taker as a K-12 music teacher. This content scoring differs from most previous work in that the responses are relatively long and are written by an adult population of generally proficient English writers. We obtain reasonably good scoring performance for all the test questions using simple features. We carry out some initial error analysis and show that there is still room for improvement.