Comparative judgement: assess student production without absolute judgements
Josh Sumner · 2021
What is it? Comparative Judgement (CJ) has emerged as a technique that typically makes use of holistic judgement to assess difficult-to-specify constructs such as production (speaking and writing) in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL). In traditional approaches, markers assess candidates’ work one-by-one in an absolute manner, assigning scores to different elements (analytic marking). In CJ, however, markers compare two pieces and consider the overall merits of each. They make one binary, holistic judgement as to which is better. This approach exploits humans’ natural ability to compare; we find it easy, for example, to say which of two people is taller, but struggle to give precise estimates of height.