6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

Scoring performance
Impression scoring
Chapter 5 
showed how selected response formats, such as multiple 
choice or matching, are designed for ease of scoring. With these item 
types, scorers can relatively easily be replaced by machines, which will 
tend to be more accurate and less demanding. On the other hand, 
because they restrict the range of responses, selected response formats 
are uninformative about how well learners are able to use language for 
social purposes. 
Performance tests
can provide better evidence of this, 
but scoring them requires skill and judgement on the part of the scorer 
or 
rater
, as judges of extended performance are often known.
One apparently straightforward approach to awarding scores to a 
performance is impression scoring. The rater awards a score out of an 
arbitrary total to refl ect the quality of the performance. Percentages 
are a popular option, perhaps because they give a reassuring (but 
spurious) air of statistical precision. Raters fi nd impression marking 

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