Research in automated essay scoring system has been done using latent semantic analysis (LSA) method. one of the limitations is the lack of triaining documents to optimize LSA results. regarding such limitation , the use of vector space model (VSM) can be considered this research aims to compare LSA and VSM to score essay answer. experiments are done with 13 problems with 42 test participants. overall results show that average correlation of score between VSM-human is higher than LSA-human.