Educators from all levels of education have comfortably embraced ICT for decades. More and more applications are being developed which has direct and indirect advantages on learning and teaching. What is more interesting is the fact that more free applications are now being made available to be used by the public. In this paper, the focus is on the comparison between a free Automated Essay Scoring (AES) web-based application called ‘PaperRater.com’ and human assessment by English instructors from a public university in Malaysia. Ten selected human assessed essays were assessed by individual lecturer (IL) and also a group of lecturers (GL). Those essays were then fed into ‘PaperRater.com’ and a comparison was made in terms of total scores generated by the application and the ones by the instructors. A descriptive statistical analysis was carried out to compare the scores. As a result, assessment for both types of essay recorded a difference of between 0.3 to 38.7 marks where bigger disparity was recorded between human assessed and computer based (AES) assessment. Overall, however, the strength of the relationship between GL and PR, based on the Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient, was recorded at 0.678407 which means that there is a moderate positive linear relationship. Article visualizations: