Tip from the Scoring Center: How We Score Student Essays

Measured Progress scores student essays for numerous state writing assessments. Most states use either a holistic or analytic model for scoring student writing, and although each model is distinct, they share some common features.

The holistic model allows readers to consider each piece of student writing as a whole. Readers score essays for “overall effect”: that is, the quality of thought evident in the writer’s ability to construct a meaningfully developed response on a particular topic. Levels of overall effect are determined by a balance of traits such as topic development, support/details, organization, and grammar and mechanics.

The analytic model is structured so that readers assign scores for individual traits of writing. For example, a student essay may receive a total of six scores, each indicating a level of proficiency in a compositional trait such as topic development or organization, or in a “surface feature” trait such as usage or mechanics. The analytic method of scoring produces a set of scores that may be aggregated to produce an overall score, or each score may be considered separately to assess proficiency within any trait.

The models for scoring writing are based on criteria that, together, define the nature of narrative, descriptive, expository, or persuasive essays. Generally speaking, they are: topic (or idea) development; organization, or coherence in arrangement of ideas; details, or inclusion of ideas relevant to the topic; sentence formation, or sentence structure; usage (wording), or forms and meanings of words; and mechanics—spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

Scoring and Development: Vital Cooperation

Measured Progress believes that the task of scoring student work is an integral part of the overall process of constructing reliable testing instruments. In keeping with this vision, scoring chief readers from all content areas work with curriculum and assessment specialists in a range of test-development activities to bring what they have learned from scoring to the process of test development. Our chief readers have significant experience in developing items within their fields of expertise, including writing multiple-choice and constructed-response questions, developing writing prompts, and selecting and writing passages that will be used as stimuli for a variety of test questions.