Teachers’ perspectives on the causes of rater discrepancy in an English for Academic Purposes context

Many studies have focused on discrepancies in scoring writing, focusing on determining rater types, rubrics and their interpretation, and the factors that make a particular paper hard score. This qualitative study attempts to understand sources of discrepancy from the perspective of the raters themselves. Teachers from an English medium university freshmen academic skills programme provided scores and comments on an exemplar paper with an analytic, three-criteria rubric. Results reveal considerable differences within content and organisation criteria. In the next stage, unstructured interviews were conducted with three teachers from the programme, and their perspectives on rating were compared, and used to interpret possible causes of discrepancies in the first stage. Although the interviewees’ attitudes to the scoring process were broadly similar in terms of accounting for discrepancies, each had a different focus: on institutional factors, teacher role, and the rating process, respectively. The implications for L2 writing standardization are discussed.