Assessment of EFL Writing at the Arab University Level under Scrutiny: A Need for a Writing Rubric

Abstract

At the Arab tertiary level, the impressionistic assessment and marking scheme of students' written products in their standardised examination is the norm. However, such scheme remains problematic. It is criticised for being subjective based on teachers' preferences rather than on demonstrable and predefined criteria to guide and justify their scoring decision. Considering this situation, the purpose of this paper is to develop a criterion-referenced writing rubric as an alternative to the current impressionistic assessment. The rubric is elicited from the best merits of existing relevant literature. To achieve this end, this paper examines the arguments for and against both analytic and holistic evaluation approaches currently in use. This paper is significant in several ways: First, the proposed rubric is hoped to provide writing teachers in the Arab world in general and in Iraq in particular with an instrument to guide them to do the job of assessing and scoring students’ written work resulting in more reliable and valid results. Second, to date, there are only few studies conducted in this field at the Arab university-level. This paper is therefore an endeavour to contribute toward expanding the existing literature. Third, it opens up opportunities for further research to investigate how far the application of the writing rubric is useful in comparison to the current impressionistic assessment. This paper highlights that the proposed rubric has some practical implications. It closes with a conclusion.