More Teaching. Less Correcting.
Criterion ®
The tool to help students plan, write and revise their essays
The Criterion ® Online Writing Evaluation service is a web-based, instructor-led writing tool that helps students plan, write and revise their essays. It gives students immediate diagnostic feedback and opportunities to practice writing at their own pace. This service offers instructors and administrators at schools, universities and learning institutions a comprehensive writing solution to help improve student results by freeing up valuable classroom time for practicing higher level writing skills and working on areas of improvement.
Did you know?
Criterion ® helps you benchmark writing, track progress, make language level placement decisions and guide instruction.
Testimonial
My relevance in the classroom has been enhanced through the use of the ETS Criterion programme for today I am more of a "coach". The conversations with my students, which were once focused on "errors" are now focused on "expectations".
Richard, Assistant Principal, Benito Juarez Academy (Chicago)
Why choose the Criterion® Online Writing Evaluation Service?
In addition to giving administrators data that allows them to make important decisions, Criterion ® helps instructors focus on higher-level writing skills while providing students with practice and direct feedbacks.
Thanks to Criterion in-depth reports that complement their student management systems, instructors can easily monitor district, school, and classroom writing performance. Criterion can help instructors benchmark students’ writing, track progress, make language level placement decisions, and tailor their lessons. Administrators can use the Criterion service to measure student progress and determine necessary programme improvements.
Moreover, to help improve classroom efficiency, this tool provides instructors with online, real-time access to instructor-specific writing assignments. The variety of topics readily available helps instructors save time grading papers allowing them to fully concentrate on the content and style of their students’ work. Criterion has customisable reports, which allow instructors to review student progress and highlight areas of improvement.
The Criterion Online Writing Evaluation Service also provides students with unlimited opportunities to practice and improve their writing, which can help them achieve higher test scores. Criterion offers instant feedback and scores so students can improve their skills with confidence.
How does it work?
The patented e-rater ® scoring engine, developed by ETS, provides both annotated diagnostic feedback and holistic scoring using level-specific models based on essays pre-scored by ETS-trained readers. This engine provides diagnostic feedback for five key categories: grammar, usage, mechanics, style, and organisation & development.
Students can use these evaluations to revision as they re-write their essay submissions. The computer-generated holistic score is aligned to each grade/level based on models built from essays previously scored by human readers. The holistic score reflects the overall quality of the writing. It is a single numerical score given to the essay. Scores range from 1 to 6 or 1 to 4.
The e-rater ® scoring engine provides holistic scores that are in close agreement with human scorers. While it supports all stages of student writing, this tool does not grade essay content and cannot replace teacher instructions and feedback. Instead, it provides supplemental feedback to help improve writing skills. With it, teachers can save time and enhance their classroom instruction.
Test information
- A library of more than 440 essay subjects
- Creation of customised topics by the teacher
- Diagnosis in grammar, spelling, language functioning, use, style, organisation and development
- Opportunities for interactions between teacher and student
- Adapted to programmes at all levels
- Online training and individual customer support
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English impacts your business and helps drive growth. That is why, for more than 70 years, ETS helps decision-makers worldwide make a more informed decision.
e-rater ® Scoring Engine
Evaluates students’ writing proficiency with automatic scoring and feedback
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The e-rater ® Engine in Criterion ® Online Writing Evaluation Service
The Criterion ® Online Writing Evaluation Service uses the e-rater ® engine. When writers read a topic and write an essay response for the Criterion service, they’ll receive a score that corresponds to a faculty test reader's evaluation based on the scoring criteria for that topic, as well as detailed feedback on possible errors made.
Essay feedback and improvement
The e-rater score and trait-level feedback provided through the Criterion interface can help students improve their writing skills in the context of an instructor-led writing course.
The e-rater technology is an embedded real-time application that can’t read or respond to an essay as a teacher would. The computer learns to score essays on each topic by extracting linguistic features of writing based on regularities observed in a large group of "training" essays at each score point on the score scale.
The e-rater engine is designed to be used in conjunction with a writing instructor or teacher. The role of the teacher as manager and guide of a larger program of writing instruction is significant and has been repeatedly mentioned in research.
Advisory messages
In some cases, the e-rater engine generates both a score and an advisory message. These advisory messages are an indication that the essay isn’t typical of other essays submitted on the topic. Writers should consider these messages along with the overall score and other feedback when they analyze their essays. Advisory messages serve as alerts to writers that the e-rater engine can intercept many essays that aren’t authentic responses to the essay topic.
Generating advisory messages and doing the ongoing work to improve the capability to detect nonsense or off-topic responses is part of our commitment to enhancing the value of the e-rater engine score.
Ready to begin? Contact us to learn how the e-rater service can enhance your existing program.
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