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Is One Dataset Enough for Evaluation? Studying Generalizability of Automated Essay Scoring Models

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has made significant advancements in writing assessment. Recently, cross-prompt AES has gained attention because of its focus on generalizing to unseen prompts. Despite the promise of these advancements, a critical question remains: how generalizable and robust are those models when applied to diverse datasets? This study assesses the generalizability of eight cross-prompt AES models across three different datasets. We employ two experimental setups: the within-dataset approach, where both training and testing occur on the same dataset, and the cross-dataset approach, which challenges the models by evaluating their performance on previously unseen datasets. The experimental results show significant performance inconsistencies, highlighting that relying on a single dataset is insufficient for building robust and generalizable AES systems.