Scoring Procedures for Assessing Writing

The evaluation of writing ability of L2 students has become increasingly important in recent years, because the results of such evaluations are used for a variety of administrative, instructional, and research purposes. One of the first decisions to be made in determining a system for directly assessing writing quality is what type of scoring procedure will be used: Should a single score be given to each text, or should the different features of a text be scored separately? This issue has been the subject of a great deal of research and discussion in the composition literature. Among others, two types of scoring procedures have mainly been discussed: analytic and holistic scoring. Holistic Scoring An efficient and increasingly popular approach to writing assessment is holistic scoring, which aims to rate the overall proficiency level reflected in a given sample of student writing. In a typical holistic scoring session, each writing sample is read quickly and then judged against a rating scale, or scoring rubric, that outlines the scoring criteria. Holistic scoring rubrics generally consist of 4 to 10 levels or bands, each of which corresponds to a score and a set of descriptors. These descriptors in the rubric can be either general or fairly specific. The existence of a scorin