Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has gained increasing attention in recent years, yet research on Arabic AES remains limited due to the lack of publicly available datasets. To address this, we introduce LAILA, the largest publicly available Arabic AES dataset to date, comprising 7,859 essays annotated with holistic and trait-specific scores on seven dimensions: relevance, organization, vocabulary, style, development, mechanics, and grammar. We detail the dataset design, collection, and annotations, and provide benchmark results using state-of-the-art Arabic and English models in prompt-specific and cross-prompt settings. LAILA fills a critical need in Arabic AES research, supporting the development of robust scoring systems.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has shown significant advancements in educational assessment. However, under-resourced languages like Arabic have received limited attention. To bridge this gap and enable robust Arabic AES, this paper introduces the first publicly-available comprehensive set of engineered features tailored for Arabic AES, covering surface-level, readability, lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 620 Arabic essays, each annotated with both holistic and trait-specific scores. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed feature set is effective across different models and competitive with recent NLP advances including LLMs, establishing the state-of-the-art performance and providing strong baselines for future Arabic AES research. Moroever, the resulting feature set offers a reusable and foundational resource, contributing towards the development of more effective Arabic AES systems.