Assessing extended writing: Options and innovations

One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks facing teachers is the assessment of extended pieces of writing. This article will outline some of the challenges and trade-offs involved with the assessment of writing at the moment, and then consider whether comparative judgement offers an improvement on these traditional methods. In order to see why assessing writing is so tricky, we first need to consider two fundamental assessment concepts: validity and reliability. Take validity first. Whenever we look at a student's test results, we need to know if it is valid for us to make certain inferences about those results. For example, a teacher might want to make inferences about a student's particular strengths and weaknesses, about whether they need extra help in writing, or about their overall performance in comparison to their peers. There are inferences that employers and universities might like to make too: can they use the results of a writing assessment to support an inferenc