E-learning is gradually gaining prominence in higher education, with universities enlarging provision and more students getting enrolled. The effectiveness of automated essay scoring (AES) is thus holding a strong appeal to universities for managing an increasing learning interest and reducing costs associated with human raters. The growth in…

Within higher education, it is often believed that the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) will provide domestic students with the language skills that will enable them to be more competitive in their future professional pursuits. However, research into language learning and EMI at the university level is very scarce. This study examined…

This paper attempts to demonstrate the differences in writing between International English Language Testing System (IELTS) bands 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0. An analysis of exemplars provided from the IELTS test makers reveals that IELTS 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0 writers can make a minimum of 206 errors, 96 errors and 35 errors per 1000 words. The following section…

Raters of Georgia's (USA) state-mandated college-level writing exam, which is intended to ensure a minimal university-level writing competency, are trained to grade holistically when assessing these exams. A guiding principle in holistic grading is to not focus exclusively on any one aspect of writing but rather to give equal weight to style,…

This study examined the reliability of scores assigned to the essays written by Kentucky students to meet the University Writing Requirement (UWR) at Eastern Kentucky University. Two sets of essays, 50 each, on the same prompt that had been read and scored in 1989 and 1997 by trained UWR scorers were read by 7 UWR scorers in 2000. A correlation…

Studied the relationship between writing skills tested on a relatively brief standardized assessment and some nontest indicators of student writing ability. Results for 2,057 college students show modest correlations between writing assessment essays and the various nontest indicators, with performance on the assessment exhibiting the strongest…

A study examined the expectations of incoming University of Tennessee at Chattanooga freshmen about an hour-long placement essay. Subjects, 96 randomly chosen students, responded to a series of 5 questions concerning what an essay is, what kinds of writing they had done, how they feel about writing tests, what topics they had written about in…

The effects of two distinct ways of responding to a student essay (discrete-item attention to form and holistic feedback on meaning) were compared for a linguistically diverse group of 26 first-year college students. Findings suggest that the holistic response is likely to result in improvements in grammatical accuracy. (19 references) (Author/LB)

Non native speakers of English wishing to study at tertiary level in English speaking countries are increasingly required to prove their English language competence by taking an internationally recognised test such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the International English Language Testing Systems (IELTS). This article…