Composition assessment scholars have exhibited uneasiness with the language of norming grounded in distaste for the psychometric assumption that achievement of consensus in a communal assessment setting is desirable even at the cost of individual pedagogical values. Responding to the problems of a "reliability" defined by homogenous agreement,…

Investigates how experienced and inexperienced raters score essays written by English as a Second Language (ESL) students on two different prompts. Shows that the inexperienced raters were more severe than the experienced raters on one prompt but not on the other prompt, and that differences between the two groups of raters were eliminated…