Til bo’yicha bilimlarni baxolash turlari va me’zonlari

UZBEK VIGNETTE
At the end of a course, students are assessed based on the presentation of their project work. The process involves 20-minute speech delivered by students, and a question-answer part from members of a specially assigned assessing committee. Then, the presenter is to leave the room and the committee members discuss and agree on the score to be announced. Sometimes, students disagree with the granted scores and consider them unfair. For example, the other day, one of the students presented on a topic that he liked a lot during the course and he received instruction on it during classes. However, when he presented, one of the committee members, was very critical of the selected approaches in the project work and he marked the student down claiming the absence of the required procedures. The student was shocked as, in his project work; he followed the procedures taught by his teacher. Therefore, the mark seemed to be very unfair.
Assessment criteria. Marking criteria or rubric is central to making sure that subjectively-scored assessments are valid and fair for subjectively scored assessments. We believe a teacher cannot and should not assess a student unless there are clear criteria from which he or she is to be assessed. A piece of work (i.e., essay) or oral response (i.e., interview) by a student that is assessed without using any criteria is regarded unacceptable. A common issue in Uzbekistan is that criteria for one assessment is used for multiple situations and does not address the appropriate content to be measured. (Thus, many subjectively-scored tests are not valid.) It should be noted that adapting criteria should be approached with specific attention, as the quality and clearness of scale descriptors can affect scoring and its validity. Another common issue is interpreting scale descriptors for assessment. Therefore, creators of criteria must make sure that there is no ambiguity in descriptors and teacher, in their turn, need to notify the issues observed. Responsibility of fair assessment lies on teachers. The proper use of rating criteria is also crucial, which means that teachers need to be attentive in making their decisions. Holistic and Analytic Scoring. There are two main types of scoring: holistic and analytic. Holistic scoring looks at the whole picture of the student’s work. Thus, you will need to provide one general score. Analytic scoring, however, is concerned with separate constituents when assessing. Your task is to look at various aspects or scoring facets to generate a score. Here is an example of holistic criteria that was used by Pat Blogger (as cited in Bailey, 1999) for his test, which was an attempt to measure English language ability with respect to understanding written passages first and then to work with that information in order to construct arguments :
Holistic Scale for a Speaker’s Effectiveness of Argumentation
7 Relevant arguments are presented in an interesting way, with main ideas prominently and clearly stated, with completely effective supporting material; arguments are effectively related to the speaker’s view.
6 Relevant arguments are presented in an interesting way; main ideas are highlighted with effective supporting material, and are well related to the speaker’s own views.
5 Arguments are well presented with relevant supporting material and an attempt to relate them to the speaker’s views.
4 Arguments are presented but it may be difficult for the rater to distinguish main ideas from supporting material; main ideas may not be supported; their relevance may be dubious; arguments may not be related to the speaker’s views.
3 Arguments are presented, but may lack relevance, clarity, consistency or support; they may not be related to the speaker’s views.
2 Arguments are inadequately presented and supported; they may be irrelevant; if the speaker’s views are presented, their relevance maybe difficult to see.
1 Some elements of information are present but the rater is not pr ovided with an argument, or the argument is mainly irrelevant.
0 A meaning comes through occasionally but it is not relevant.
This rubric is holistic because the assessor will provide one score, from 0 to 7, to the student based on the descriptors for e ach level. There are both advantages and
disadvantages to using holistic scoring methods.
Advantages and Disadvantages for Holistic Scoring

Advantages	Disadvantages
Higher rater reliability can be achieved	May mask differences across individual assignments
Scoring scale can be understood by students and teachers.	Does not provide much useful diagnostic feedback.
Applicable to many different topics	Fails to capture important differences
Emphasizes strengths rather than weakness
Great potential for positive washback

Inter(Intra)-rater reliability. One of the significant challenges in performance and direct assessments is inter-rater reliability (between two people)/ intra -rater reliability (amongst yourself as an assessor). It is very hard to achieve consistency in marking not only between one rater with the other, but also among various instances of assessment made by the same rater. It appears subjectivity cannot be avoided and we find quite frequently teachers who are quite generous and kind in marking, while others are quite harsh and demanding. To mitigate this endless problem, raters are usually asked to have benchmarking before they conduct assessment. Benchmarking is when two raters are both assigned to check the same written work or conduct a spoken examination together. In this case, both specialists must agree on a certain score. A third rater might be invited in cases when the judgement of the two differ significantly. In McNamara (2000, p.58) minimum acceptable inter-rater agreement range from 50%, which other 50% are the cases when raters disagree. Much acceptable is the case of 80% agreement to 20% disagreement, which can be the result of accurate wording or criteria or proper training of the raters. For information on the mathematical formulas on how to conduct inter-rater and intra-rater reliability, we recommend referring to Bailey (1998).

Informing and Explaining a Score. Very often, in the Uzbekistan context, students tend to ask for the explanation of a score. Arguments over a score can be avoided if transparent scoring is in place , which means that students need to know how are they assessed and why they are granted a certain score. Issues come out from the absence and ambiguity of marking criteria. Therefore, the primary concern of a rater must be whether the granted score is thoroughly considered and whether the necessary procedures have been used.
In conclusion, subjectively-scored assessment can be very challenging for a teacher and it is hard to abstain from impressionistic marking. We recommend sticking closely to using either a holistic or analytic scoring method. However, a teacher must be conscious of ethics in assessment, as whatever mark we-teachers settle on might change the course of events in the lives of our students. Therefore, assessment is great responsibility.