Hewlett Foundation offering $100,000 for design of automated essay grader

That's ridiculous. Essays are already being shoe-horned into the 3-paragraph/introduction/conclusion format and (I believe) it's quite harmful to budding writers.

An automated system of marking will mean two things:

1. Students will write more essays because they can be marked faster but... 2. The increased quantity will dictate an even more strict "style".

Hmmm.... more information here: http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes. There are three awards: 1st: $60,000, 2nd: $30,000, and 3rd: $10,000.

The award level seems low even though "[E]ach team maintains full, exclusive and absolute rights to their intellectual property".

I suspect that any truly adequate automated essay grader would imply strong AI or at the very least some optimization process good enough that it might as well be strong AI.

    ...  to gage students’ work ...

Really? "gage"? This is an academic blog ...