Inspired by Vaswani’s transformer, we propose in this paper an attention-based transformer neural network with a multi-head attention mechanism for the task of student answer assessment. Results show the competitiveness of our proposed model. A highest accuracy of 71.5% was achieved when using ELMo embeddings, 10 heads of attention, and 2 layers. This is very competitive and rivals the highest accuracy achieved by a previously proposed BI-GRU-Capsnet deep network (72.5%) on the same dataset. The main advantages of using transformers over BI-GRU-Capsnet is reducing the training time and giving more space for parallelization.