Student Self-Assessment of High-Stakes Tests: An Exploratory Study in an English for Liberal Arts Program

The authors report on research they conducted in which Japanese college students shared responsibility for self-assessing their own written work on two high stakes tests. In this experiment, students served as a second raters on tests that are normally blind rated by two instructors. After engaging in an orientation and norming session identical to that which rating instructors do, students assessed their own tests using the same rubric that instructors use. Following the institutional policy requiring that blind raters must be within two points in their assessment of a piece of writing, students were also required to be within the same range of the first rating instructor in order to satisfy inter-rater reliability, otherwise the test, as is the standard procedure, went to a third rater (in this case, another instructor). While the results showed that students’ tended to rate themselves too high, the level of discrepancy between teacher and student ratings was not so extreme as to preclude exploring self-assessment further. In addition, the students generally perceived self- assessment as a positive experience. It is hoped that the lessons learned through this pilot study can lead to the successful establishment of self-assessment for future writing tests.