Scoring Essays and Problems

Dr. Carol E. Baker, Former Director of the Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching

As you can see, scoring of objective tests is quite simple. Scoring of essay tests and problems takes considerably more time and you have to worry about being consistent across student responses. This is why essay items should be limited to those learning objectives that require the essay format. Once you have used an essay item, it is your professional responsibility to score the responses properly and to provide useful feedback to students. There are two methods of scoring essay items, the analytic approach and the holistic approach.

1. To use the analytic method, you develop a list of the major elements you believe students should include in the ideal answer.
2. The holistic approach to scoring essay items involves your reading an entire response and assigning it to a category identified by a score or grade.

Regardless of whether you decide to use an analytic or holistic method of scoring, there are several guidelines to consider with respect to the scoring of essay tests:

• Develop scoring criteria or model answers.
• If there are several essay questions, score all of the students’ responses to one question at a time. This improves consistency and reduces any “carryover” effects.
• Decide whether you are going to score factors other than content, such as spelling, language usage, and organization. Make sure that your students are aware if you are, and give a separate score for these factors.
• Score essay responses anonymously to avoid any bias resulting from your familiarity with students and their previous work. One idea is to have students write their names on the back of the answer sheet or booklet.

Periodically check to see whether you have applied the criteria in the same way to later-scored answers as to earlier-scored ones.

• If you have a large number of papers to score, stop when you get tired so that your frame of mind will not cause your scoring to be inconsistent. When you start again, read over the last few papers you scored to be sure that your scoring was objective.
• Provide students with feedback so that the test provides an opportunity for students to learn their strengths and weaknesses. You can provide short written comments or verbal feedback to students in a brief conference.

It is obvious that you will need to spend a great deal of time and effort to do a thorough job in scoring essay items. You may want to start out by using short-answer essay items and as you feel more comfortable with the process, refining your items to require a more extended answer. Use essay items judiciously; consider whether you can test the learning objective you have set with complex multiple choice items instead. If you decide that essay items are the best way to test student understanding of your learning objectives, give yourself enough time for the scoring of the test so that your information about students will be as reliable and valid as possible.

For more information about the two methods of scoring essays, please see the Scoring Essays and Problems document below.

As Nitko (1996) and others emphasize, the following three principles are important to follow when constructing classroom assessments:

• Focus on your teaching and learning objectives.
• Develop your assessments so that they elicit from your students only the knowledge and performance that are relevant to your teaching and learning objectives.
• Write items that do not inhibit or prevent the student’s ability to demonstrate attainment of your learning objectives.

When you construct an assessment, you should ask yourself whether each item measures something that you really think is important for students to know. Even if a test is difficult, students will consider it fair if it covers the learning objectives and content you have stressed. If students have mastered the learning objectives, they should be able to perform well on your tests. Likewise, if students are having difficulty with the learning objectives, these deficiencies should be reflected in their test scores. If items are ambiguously or poorly worded, if directions are not clear, if examples use material that is not familiar to all students, then some students who have attained your learning objectives may still answer items incorrectly. If you are aware of and make an effort to follow the three principles, you will develop tests that have the desired technical properties referred to as reliability and validity.