This study employed a mixed-methods approach to examine how rater performance develops during a semester-long rater certification program for an English as a Second Language (ESL) writing placement test at a large US university. From 2016 to 2018, we tracked three groups of novice raters (n = 30) across four rounds in the certification program.…

A short training program for evaluating responses to an essay writing task consisted of scoring 20 training essays with immediate feedback about the correct score. The same scoring session also served as a certification test for trainees. Participants with little or no previous rating experience completed this session and 14 trainees who passed an…

Automated essay scoring can produce reliable scores that are highly correlated with human scores, but is limited in its evaluation of content and other higher-order aspects of writing. The increased use of automated essay scoring in high-stakes testing underscores the need for human scoring that is focused on higher-order aspects of writing. This…

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct…

The present study employed multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) to explore the rater bias patterns of native English-speaker (NES) raters when they rate EFL essays. Forty NES raters rated 40 essays written by female Japanese university students on a single topic adapted from the TOEFL Test of Written English (TWE). The essays were assessed using…