Abstract
This paper examined the relationship between the purposes of essay tests that were either for college entrance or for employment, and their scoring systems used by study-aid books for such tests. Comments made on 342 essays that appeared in study-aid books were sorted, based on similarity, into 10 categories. Extracted factors, along with scores given to each essay, were multiple regressed. The effective factors extracted for the employment exams were "whether the idea is unique and realistic" and "logical structure of the essay", a result consistent with the said-purposes of such exams. For the college entrance exams, the primary factor "logical unfolding of opinion in accordance with the task requirement" solely accounted for more than 70% of the scores, which is partly inconsistent with said-purposes of entrance exams.
