6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 Part 
II
enough information about how well they will perform other aspects 
of the job. At a formative level, although they provide a basis for 
feedback to the assessees, they are less helpful than more generic 
scales in suggesting how learners might perform better on different 
tasks in the future. For these reasons, most operational scales are 
more generic in nature.
Holistic versus analytic scales
Weigle’s (2002) second distinction is between scales that are used to 
award a single score (
holistic
scales
) and those that are used to award 
multiple scores to a single script (or spoken performance) (
analytic 
scales
). In holistic rating, the rater consults a set of graded descriptions 
such as those in 
Table 6.4
and considers how far the performance 
satisfi es the stated criteria. He or she decides either which level best 
describes the performance (the ‘best fi t’), or at which level the 
performance fully satisfi es all of the stated criteria. 
Primary trait
scales 
are holistic scales that have been designed to accompany a specifi c task 
and refl ect features of writing or speaking that are believed to be