Most official criteria first apply a holistic view: overall impression, fluency and how pleasant the text is to read AND secondly detailed components: content/message, language and accuracy of language

Marking and evaluating any pieces of writing is always a challenging and time-consuming task for the teachers. Marking is supposed to be fair and reliable but one has to admit that there is always a little room for subjectivity.

In teacher training in Finland we first aim at a situation where every teacher trainee’s evaluation of an essay, for example, is within 5 points of the experts’ opinion (the scale being 0 – 100). Having marked hundreds of essays the teachers’ marking is usually within a couple of points.

For this reason in order to guarantee the maximum amount of objectivity we have to have criteria that is easy to use once we have been trained how to use it. The criteria has to be explained and analysed to the students too. It is the only way to show them what is expected from them when they write essays or work on any other written assignments.

In order to save paper give your criteria to the students once a year and ask them to glue it in their essay notebooks. During the year the students will mark their progress on the criteria sheet, each essay with its own symbol. The students are allowed to glance at the criteria even during exams.

Criteria never tell you directly what to do to get to the next level. Criteria only tell what is required at that level. CLT researchers have provided us with lots of strategies how the students can improve their language skills.

Learning strategies will help the students on the question ‘HOW to get to the next level in writing or any other language skill area. I have lots of comments on these strategies separately and under most of the topics, too.

Many students quickly become very good at evaluating their own and other students’ products. They realize that the detailed criteria open the door to the improvement of their essays.

Then they start to ask questions of the following kind:

• How can I get more points for my argumentative essays?
• Is there a commonly accepted structure for good essays?
• How can I impress the reader with my vocabulary?
• Which grammatical structures appeal to the reader?
• What is meant by complex and simple sentences?
• How much do mistakes affect the points given?
• Are all mistakes equally serious?
• What if I have a lot of spelling mistakes?
• Do we have to follow the conventions of text types? Newspaper articles, reviews, interviews, blogs etc.?

Some of these questions are answered in my other articles, others in this very same article. If the student gets criteria-based feedback on his/her writing task, they will know which areas they are good at and which areas require much more work.

For instance, if the teacher gives the following points for the essay: overall impression 7,5, content/message 8/10, vocabulary and structures 6/10 and accurary/mistakes 7,5/10, the student will start wondering ‘How can I get 9/10 for content?’, ‘What’s wrong with my structures and vocabulary?; I think it is better than that?, ‘What are my most serious mistakes?

The remedy for the defects of a text can be found by applying the criteria to the text and using writing strategies.

Let’s now check how to proceed with using the ‘unofficial sample’ criteria below. It can be used in age groups 12 – 18 provided it is modified to the proficiency level of the students. Each column is enlarged below with some additional comments.

How to use this sample criteria if you are marking an essay

Choice 1 My recommended way of proceeding:

• Start with the green ‘First Impressions’ column = Ease to read /Flow of ideas/ Fluency and decide which grade applies to the text you are reading.
• Then move to the right to each yellow ‘Detailed criteria’ columns separately and decide on your grade.
• The underlying idea is that ‘Content/message’, ‘Language’ and ‘Accurary’ columns are of equal value; i.e. have equal effect on the final grade
• Finally come back to the ‘green’ column and see if the ‘yellow’ column grades match the green column one.
• The average grade of ‘Content/message’, ‘Language’ and ‘Accurary’ columns should be close to your ‘First Impression’ grade in the green column. And this average grade is the final grade in most cases!
• NOW, having done this procedure you can ‘objectively’ give the final mark and justify the grades against your marking sheet, both for the students and their parents.
• For example, Overall impression 8+ out of 10, Content 7, Language 9-, Accuracy 8,5.

Choice 2 Some teachers prefer to move horizontally from the green column to the right. Their assumption is that the student’s level remains approximately the same in all columns, maybe going up or down one step but no more. If you know the student’s proficiency level, this is a faster way to give the grade since you do not have to read all criteria texts.

• Let’s look at an example on proceeding horizontally: If you give, say, 6 points for ‘Flow of ideas’, move to the right on the same line to the other columns and see if the other standards match at level 6 or not. If they do not Move up or down in each column until you are pleased.
• If you think the grade is between even grades 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 use grades 9, 7, 5 and 3.
• Even half points, pluses or minuses are ok, if you feel like it.
• Now the student can decide which skill area he/she wants to develop next and how to do it. This document is also easy for parents to understand if you meet them at some discussions.  

Additional comments on the columns