A system for carrying out a content-based process for automatically scoring essays is disclosed. The system includes a computer; a data storage device; a parse tree file stored in the data storage device, the parse tree file being representative of an essay in a parse tree format; a morphology stripping program; a concept extraction program for creating, on the basis of a morphology-stripped parse tree file, a phrasal node file; and a rule matching scoring program for scoring the essay on the basis of the phrasal node file.