TEM Journal. Volume 11, Issue 4, pages 1694-1701, ISSN 2217‐8309, DOI: 10.18421/TEM114-34, November 2022. 1694 TEM Journal – Volume 11 / Number 4 / 2022. An Automated Essay Scoring Based on Neural Networks to Predict and Classify Competence of Examinees in Community Academy I Gusti Putu Asto Buditjahjanto, Mohammad Idhom, Munoto Munoto, Muchlas Samani Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Doctoral Program of Vocational Education, Surabaya, Indonesia Abstract – AES has been widely used in assessing student learning outcomes. However, few studies use Automated Essay Scoring (AES) to simultaneously determine the community academy's competency test scores and levels. This study aims to apply AES to assess essays on the competency certification test. The AES can predict the examinees' scores and classify examinees' competency levels. The method used to build AES uses Back Propagation Neural Networks (BPNN). BPNN was chosen because of its simplicity and ease in building the model. The results showed that the AES for predicting the examinee's competency value showed the MAE value is 0.061621 and the accuracy value is = 97.9665 %. The results of the classification of student competency levels show Accuracy= 0.9063, Precision= 0.9167, Recall= 0.8888, and F1 Score= 0.8857. Keywords – Assessment, competency certification, human rater, neural networks, multimedia IT. DOI: 10.18421/TEM114-34 https://doi.org/10.18421/TEM114-34 Corresponding author: I.G.P.A. Buditjahjanto, Doctoral Program of Vocational Education, Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Indonesia. Email: asto@unesa.ac.id Received: 23 August 2022. Revised: 01 October 2022. Accepted: 10 October 2022. Published: 25 November 2022. © 2022 I.G.P.A. Buditjahjanto et al; published by UIKTEN. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs 4.0 License. The article is published with Open Access at https://www.temjournal.com/ 1. Introduction Community Academy is a university that provides vocational education at the level of diploma one or diploma two in one or several branches of particular science and technology [1]. Community Academy in East Java – Indonesia, focuses on multimedia IT expertise. Before graduating from this community academy, the students must have competency in multimedia IT expertise. Cause competency certification is proof to acknowledge the expertise of the workforce. In line with [2], competency certification is an acknowledgment of workforce skills towards mastery of knowledge, skills, and work attitudes by the required work competency standards. Recognition of competence is carried out with competency testing. Competency testing can be carried out through technical and non-technical assessments by collecting relevant evidence to determine whether a person is competent or not in a particular certification scheme [3]. Shavelson [4] stated that competence can be identified as a task, a problem, or a stimulus that is considered to generate these competencies. Engaging in a task can observe a person's behavior or response. Either the presence or absence of a construct can be assessed, or a person's level of performance can be assessed. It is known that several ways can be used to assess a person's abilities, for example, given questions in the form of multiple choice, short answers, and essays [5].In the competency test, to assess a person's ability, the assessment method used is to test in the form of essay questions that competency test participants must answer by writing answers. Essay assessment is a form of competency test used to evaluate the competency value and competency level of the competency test participants. Some researchers consider that essay assessment is considered a potent tool to measure learning outcomes, as well as to observe higher-order thinking