6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

particularly pertinent to that task.
Analytic scales, in contrast, require the rater to award a number 
of different scores across a range of categories or 
criteria
. For 
example, the scales in 
Table 6.5
 include the following criteria: 
Range
,
 Accuracy
,
 Fluency
,
 Interaction 
and
 Coherence
.
 
Separate 
scores are awarded to a performance on each of the criteria. These 
may then be added together to give an overall score. Analytic scales 
that have been designed for use with a specifi c task are known as 
multiple trait 
scales.
Notice that the holistic–analytic distinction is more a distinction 
between scoring processes than between scales. The TOEFL scale 
(
Table 6.4
) has implicit criteria that we could give labels for use in 
analytic scoring, such as ‘organisation and development’ or ‘sentence 
structure and usage’. Equally, the CEFR scale (
Table 6.5
) could be 
used in holistic scoring: raters could consult all the criteria, but 
award a single overall CEFR level.
Analytic scales allow for differential weighting to be applied across 
categories. If the assessment construct suggests that one feature should 
be given more attention than others, the criteria that refl ect this feature 
can be more heavily weighted and so contribute more to the overall 
score. For example, if a scale has three criteria and fi ve levels, the score 
for the category of primary interest – 
Fluency
, for example