John Maurice Gayed

Author directory

2026

Second language writers rarely receive the detailed feedback they need to improve, as comprehensive feedback takes teachers days per class. To solve this, we present WrAFT, a Writing Assessment and Feedback Tool, that delivers reliable scores along with effective comprehensive feedback for argumentative essays. WrAFT adopts a modular design by dividing the automated writing evaluation (AWE) into essay scoring, surface-level feedback and deep-level feedback. In building the system, various Large Language Models (LLMs) have been evaluated, including LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.7, through both supervised fine-tuning and direct prompting. Evaluation shows that WrAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance in scoring with a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 0.84 on a proprietary dataset of 480 TOEFL Independent Writing essays. More importantly, human evaluation of system-generated feedback also reveals high approval ratings (96.14% for surface-level, 93.03% for deep-level macro feedback, and 94.69% for deep-level micro feedback). Publicly available interactive user interface has also been developed for the system.