The purpose of this study was to examine rater, domain, and gender influences on the assessed quality of student writing using weighted and unweighted scores. Twenty rates were randomly selected from a group of 87 operational raters contracted to rate essays as part of the 1993 field test of the Georgia High School Writing Test. All of the raters…

The effects of presenting a choice of writing tasks on the quality of essays produced by eleventh graders were studied with 34,200 students in Georgia. The choice condition had no substantive effect on the quality of essays, but race, gender, and the writing task variable did. (SLD)