Holistic
Scoring: Criteria
Holistic
assessment at Southeast is based on considering six criteria when
determining the overall impression of an essay. The first five
criteria are applied to part I of WP002 and WP003; the sixth is applied
only to part II. These six criteria are
Focus
In order for students to achieve focus in their writing, they must do
the following: a) they must address the specific topic presented by the
test question, and b) they must present a main point or clear purpose for
communicating.
The writing
proficiency test contains two specific questions. Clearly, students
who do not write an answer to the questions have no chance of scoring well
on the test. However, even students who address topics will write
poorly if they do not limit their main idea to something they can
adequately discuss in the time allotted. This limiting of the topic
is often called "focusing" because both the writer's attention
and the reader's attention are zeroed in on a particular aspect of a broad
subject.
This
"focusing" often takes the form of a thesis statement, a
sentence that states the main idea of an essay. Generally, the
thesis statement occurs in the introductory paragraph. When writers
open their essays with anecdotes, statistics, or other attention-getting
material, the thesis statement is often placed at the end of that
paragraph or the beginning of the next paragraph.
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Organization
Once writers settle on a main idea, they must think about the most
effective way to organize their materials in order to convince their readers
that the main idea is a reasonable one. Thus, the supporting information
must be presented in some sort of logical progression. Obviously, if
readers cannot follow the discussion, they will have no reason to accept the
main idea.
Planned essays
are usually divided into three parts: a beginning (introduction), a middle
(body), and an end (conclusion). What goes into each of these three parts
depends on the main idea to be developed, the evidence available, and the
writer's strategy. Whatever plan of organization is used, the materials
must be logically ordered and presented, and each step in the plan must be
clearly signaled by the appropriate transition words or phrases.
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Development
When the body of writing is only one paragraph long, the writing is not an
essay. Instead, it is one paragraph with its beginning and ending
improperly separated from the middle. The middle of an essay will have at
least two to three paragraphs, and each of these paragraphs will present one
major step in a logical plan.
These middle
paragraphs usually open with the main idea to be discussed in the
paragraph. (This sentence is usually called the topic sentence.)
Without stating their main ideas, these paragraphs are likely to lack
organization, and more often than not, they become simply a collection of
unsupported major ideas that lead nowhere.
The supporting
material in these paragraphs must be specific or concrete details that support
the writer's point of view or main idea. This material, which illustrates
or explains the broader topic sentence, must be presented in a logical order.
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Style
Sentence coherence, diction, and tone combine to compose the element of
style. Coherence is a result of sentence patterns, pronoun reference, and
transitional connectives. In non-technical terms, coherence refers to the
impression that the writing "flows" and that the essay is "of a
piece." Diction signifies the appropriate choice of words; the words
used must be accurate, appropriate, and effective in conveying the writer's
intended meaning. Tone is the emotional attitude of writers toward their
subject and audience. Whatever the writer's approach to the subject, the
tone must be consistent and appropriate to the writer's overall purpose.
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Correctness
Correctness covers the areas of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and
manuscript preparation. Correctness is important because, without it, the
reader may get the wrong information. because they create the most
confusion, the most serious errors are flaws in sentence structure, such as
fragments, comma splices and fused sentences, and errors in agreement, such as
subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement problems.
Correctness is no
substitute for a thoughtful paper; it is better to have clearly stated
generalizations that are supported by convincing specific details than to have a
perfectly correct paper that makes no point or that does not support the point
with concrete detail. Proofreading is an indispensable, but last, step in
writing.
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References
Writing that makes use of outside source materials is called
"referential" writing. In Part II of the proficiency test,
students demonstrate how logically, insightfully, and elegantly they can
incorporate into their own essays paraphrases and direct quotations from the
outside materials provided during the test.
Every time
writers use material that is not their own or that is not common knowledge, they
must indicate where they got the information. This is true regardless of
whether the writers are paraphrasing or directly quoting the source
material. In this testing situation, no particular style of documentation
is required, although students must document each use of source material in a
consistent and accurate manner.
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Method |
Criteria | Scale
| Sample graded papers
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