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The New York Times reports onNew Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

The software will be freely available to any institution that wants to use it, and apparently the grading results (after initial training) are within the range of variation expected of human graders. I'd expect that for years to come, the "artificial intelligence" code will fall short in the sense that a student who understands it (and would be getting excellent grades anyway) could use that understanding to get excellent grades for essays that any human would say are lousy. In practice, that may not matter: the essays will be online, which means that students trying to "cheat" in this way will have to face the fact that some of those essays will be seen by human readers; perhaps a random selection, perhaps at a later time, and some courses will be designed so that students read and react to two essays for each essay which they write, to provide supplementary feedback. I would think that the main value of the system will be the instant feedback that it provides; a student can submit, consider the response, submit, consider the response, submit... And learn.

Or then again, maybe not.