Assessment in Higher Education: Issues of Access, Quality, Student Development, and Public Policy

real-life writing tasks. And as testers strive for "authenticity" and cognitive complexity in their assessments, questions need to be asked about whether such strivings lead beyond the construct boundaries of writing skill and encroach on other abilities that may be less amenable to instruction.

All writing tests used in admissions are necessarily simulations of real-world writing tasks. Brief essay writing tasks, essay revision tasks, and sentence revision tasks all fail as realistic representations of writing as most of us know it. The design of writing assessments thus becomes an optimization procedure to determine what mix of assessment types will be most beneficial. The evidence available suggests that a balancing of drafting and revision tasks would be desirable.

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