Marking short free text responses in e-assessment

While many e-assessment systems support a variety of question types that are used in traditional methods of assessment, like multiple choices, true or false, hotspot, drag and drop, and gap filling questions, it has however been a challenge for developers to support automatic marking of essay type questions due to the diversity of responses that can be submitted. Marking short free text response questions has been considered instead as expected answers are specific making it reasonably easier to distinguish between those which are correct and incorrect. In this paper we present a critical review of some of the techniques and algorithms that have been adopted in systems which have attained some success in supporting these free text response question types. We give descriptions of these methods and then we discuss them considering usefulness as the review is aimed at informing the selection of one such method, for adoption in an eassessment system which is currently in development.