Comparative approaches to the assessment of writing: Reliability and validity of benchmark rating and comparative judgement

In the past years, comparative assessment approaches have gained ground as a viable method to assess text quality. Instead of providing absolute scores to a text as in holistic or analytic scoring methods, raters in comparative assessments rate text quality by comparing texts either to pre-selected benchmarks representing different levels of writing quality (i.e., benchmark rating method) or by a series of pairwise comparisons to other texts in the sample (i.e., comparative judgement; CJ). In the present study, text quality scores from the benchmarking method and CJ are compared in terms of their reliability, convergent validity and scoring distribution. Results show that benchmark ratings and CJ-ratings were highly consistent and converged to the same construct of text quality. However, the distribution of benchmark ratings showed a central tendency. It is discussed how both methods can be integrated and used such that writing can be assessed reliably, validly, but also efficiently in both writing research and practice.