There are only a few studies undertaken in developing automatic assessment systems using handwriting recognition, even though a successful system would undoubtedly benefit the education system as schools and universities in many countries still employ paper-based examinations. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no existing work on an automatic off-line short answer assessment system comprising a student identification component. Hence in this paper, the authors propose a system towards this, where a new feature extraction technique called the Enhanced Water Reservoir, Loop and Gaussian Grid Feature, as well as other enhanced feature extraction techniques were utilised. Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines were employed as the classifiers; they were used for the investigation, and a comparison of the recognition and accuracy rates of the proposed systems, as well as the feature extraction techniques, was undertaken. The proposed assessment system achieved a recognition rate of 87.12% with 91.12% assessment accuracy, and the student identification component obtained a recognition rate of 99.52% with a 100% identification accuracy rate.