Evaluation of Essay Writing Skill: Assessment Tools and Reliability

There is always subjectivity in assessing essays, and this has been an issue in language teaching for decades. This research presents a valid and reliable scoring scale which can be used to assess essay writing skill and a comparison of scorings done by using other assessing tools. 103 faculty members participated in the development process of the scale. In order to realize the reliability study, 10 scorers worked on 2640 scorings for more than 16 months. In order to determine the scorer reliability of each type of assessment, the relationship between the scorings was computed. The scorers' views on each scoring tool are also presented. Interesting results were found as there is evidence that indicates scorers might assign different scores to the same essays when they use different and even the same assessing tools in different time distances. There is also strong evidence that scale use systematizes subjectivity by framing particular concerns of scorers while scoring.