The timeline for this competition is based on the release of graded student essays in various sets, along with the deadlines for you to submit your models and predicted essay scores. We are offering eight essay sets, provided by seven states.  Each essay set was randomly split into a training, validation, and test set.
Here is a brief description of each data set (please refer to the data page for more information):
Training Set
: This set contains grades as well as the essays and is used for model development and training.
Public Leaderboard Set
: This set is used to construct the public leaderboard.
Private Leaderboard Set
:  This set is used for the final evaluation.
Here is the timeline:
Monday, June 25, 2012
:  Launch of Public Competition; Release of Training and Validation Data Sets Train
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
:  Deadline to Submit Final Models
Thursday, August 30, 2012
:  Release of Test Set
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
:  Deadline to Submit Test Set Solutions
Thursday, September 6, 2012
: Preliminary winners announced
Monday, September 17, 2012
: Deadline for preliminary winners to open-source models and publish their methods papers
Monday, September 24, 2012
: Deadline for public to submit objections (regarding cheating through manually labeling the test set, etc.) on competition results.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
: Deadline to address any objections on competition results.
Monday, October 1, 2012
: Winners announced
In order to be eligible for prizes, you are required to submit the complete model you will use to score the test set prior to the release of the test set.
All releases will be provided at 10am PST (6pm UTC); the deadlines are at midnight UTC on each scheduled date.