What influences raters' judgment of student writing
Abstract This article compares the results of a linguistic analysis of 30 students' compositions with the holistic ratings of nine independent judges. The compositions were the examination scripts of 17-year-old high school students drawn from the two levels of the Caribbean Examinations Council English Language examinations: General Proficiency and Basic Proficiency. The General Proficiency compositions, according to the examination syllabus, were expected to display a greater “maturity of expression” than compositions at the Basic Proficiency level. The linguistic analysis was based on four potential indicators of maturity: morphological (past tense morpheme only), syntactic, semantic, and discourse. The judges' holistic ratings, the method used to divide the compositions into two groups, “more mature” and “less mature,” were based on the judges' definition of the criterion “maturity of expression.” A comparison of the two sets of results on an implicational scale revealed that the factor that weighed most heavily with the judges was correct past tense usage.