Using Core Criteria to Guide Judgements about the Quality of Students’ Work
The Core Criteria approach to essay marking
This approach to essay marking is called the ‘core criteria’ approach for two reasons. First, it
promotes the adoption of a small set of criteria as a way of facilitating a coherent departmental
approach to marking and feedback processes. Second, it focuses on the use of assessment
criteria that appear to have a central role in the shared perception of what is important in good
student writing in a number of disciplines and across institutions (Elander et al., 2004). Our work
has identified the following essay assessment criteria as ‘core’:
1. Addressing the question
2. Using evidence
3. Developing argument
4. Critical evaluation
5. Structuring
6. Use of language
However, the specific criteria used, and the way they are defined, can be tailored to meet the
specific needs of the department or subject area in which they are being used.


The key features of the ‘core criteria’ approach are:
1)
Identifying a small number of central criteria that are relevant to essay writing
within the context of a department or subject area.
2)
Providing explicit, descriptive definitions of the criteria.
3)
Linking these criteria with systems for marking essays and exam answers and
providing feedback to students.
4)
Using the criteria to facilitate the development of a shared understanding of what
is important in essay writing (the meanings of the criteria as well as standards of
achieving them) amongst students and staff, by integrating the criteria into
teaching sessions with students as well as staff development exercises.1
The benefits of harmonizing marking and feedback processes across courses and years
through focussing on the same small set of criteria include:
1)
Providing a straightforward and manageable focal point for students to develop
their understandings of what is important in essay writing.
2)
Facilitating students’ ability to generalise and apply what they have learned about
essay writing from one assignment to the next.
3)
Facilitating an accumulated understanding of criteria meanings and standards
amongst staff, and thus efficient, consistent, and transparent marking and
feedback processes within a department.
1
Many of the materials used in this workshop aim to provide a way of linking core assessment criteria with
systems for marking and providing feedback, and as such they can be used to provide a focus for sessions
aimed at facilitating a shared understanding of core criteria amongst staff. Assessment Plus has also
developed a series of student workshops focusing on core assessment criteria that could be delivered as
part of a departmental approach to creating a shared understanding amongst students and staff about the
meaning of common assessment criteria. These workshops will be of particular relevance to those working
within the sciences, social sciences, and related disciplines; however, aspects of the workshops have also
been trialled in more generic settings, and many of the exercises are applicable across a range of subject
areas. The workshop protocols are available from the project website.
A+
Assessment Plus: Using assessment criteria to support student learning
HEFCE funded consortium project
http://www.assessmentplus.net
Using Core Criteria to Guide Judgements about the Quality of Students’ Work
4)
Providing a systematic and consistent format for staff to use to communicate
essay writing standards to students.
Many departments already employ detailed, systematic assessment criteria that identify specific
aspects of student writing for the purpose of marking and structuring feedback. How does the core
criteria approach differ from other approaches?
Alternative approaches with which the core criteria approach could be contrasted and/or combined
include:
1. The ‘connoisseur’ approach, in which markers have a highly developed implicit
understanding of what constitutes a good essay, but cannot readily articulate it. In this
approach, teaching interventions focusing on assessment must rely on implict learning
among students to socialise them into the community of practice to which markers belong.
It could be argued that this approach is marker-centred in that it is primarily concerned with
assessing student achievement, and only secondarily with facilitating student improvement.
One of the aims of the core criteria approach is to make explicit what is left implicit in the
connoisseur approach in the interest of creating more student-centred assessment
practices designed to enable and support learning.
2. The learning outcomes approach, in which assessment criteria are derived very directly
from the specified learning outcomes. This approach generally leads to the development of
different assessment criteria (and different formats of presenting them to students) for each
essay assignment, which can limit the degree to which assessment criteria can be used
effectively in teaching interventions that aim to help students improve their essay writing
from one assignment to the next as well as across modules. The core criteria approach
advocates the adoption of a ‘core’ set of criteria for the assessment of all essays within a
department in order to facilitate a coherent approach to helping students improve their
essay writing over time; in keeping with the learning outcomes approach, this set of criteria
can be derived from a set of learning outcomes specified as centrally relevant to essay
assignments across a department. It is also possible to adjust the specific core criteria
used and the ways they are defined in order to reflect level-specific learning outcomes for
essay assignments.
3. The assessment criteria grid approach, in which a wide range of assessment criteria are
specified from which a smaller number can be selected for any given assignment (e.g.,
Price & Rust, 1999). Criteria grids of this sort map graduated descriptions of the criteria
against grade levels. The core criteria approach has developed from this, with the aim of
narrowing the focus on a few criteria in order to gain benefits from a highly developed
understanding of the meanings of these criteria in relation to essay writing and how they
can function as the cornerstone of a coherent, integrated approach to teaching, feedback,
and marking within a department.
_____
Elander, J., Harrington, K., Norton, L., Robinson, H., Reddy, P. and Stevens, D. (2004), Core assessment
criteria for student writing and their implications for supporting learning, in C. Rust (Ed.), Improving
Student Learning 11. Theory, research and scholarship, Oxford: The Oxford Centre for Staff and
Learning Development.
Price, M. & Rust, C. (1999), The experience of introducing a common criteria assessment grid across an
academic department, Quality in Higher Education, 5 (2), 133-144.
A+
Assessment Plus: Using assessment criteria to support student learning
HEFCE funded consortium project
http://www.assessmentplus.net