Assessing Writing: How will your writing be marked at CPE level?

Assessment Criteria for Writing:

 Content

Communicative Achievement 

Organisation

Language

• Content focuses on how well you have fulfilled the task, in other words, if you have done what they were asked to do and the way it must be done: textual conventions, overall length and structure.

• Communicative Achievement focuses on how appropriate your writing is to the task and whether the candidate has used the appropriate register and style according to the audience or target readership. You should always ask yourself how appropriate and realistic your text is to the requirements of the task set.

• Organisation focuses on the way you put together the piece of writing, in other words, if it is logical and ordered, if it is coherent and fluent, easy to follow thanks to the presence of organizational patterns and varied discourse markers. At CPE level, you are expected to organise your text  impressively and coherently using a wide range of cohesive devices and organisational patterns with complete flexibility.

• Language focuses on vocabulary and grammar. This includes the range of language as well as how accurate it is. At CPE level, you are expected to use a wide range of simple and complex grammar with full control and flexibility and with sophistication as well as less common lexis, such as idioms and collocations, which add colour and idiomaticity to your text.

Responses are marked on each subscale from 0 to 5.

• Responses which are too short may not have an adequate range of language

and may not provide all the information that is required, while responses which

are too long may contain irrelevant content and have a negative effect on the

reader. These may affect candidates’marks on the relevant subscales.

• Candidates are expected to use a particular variety of English with some degree

of consistency in areas such as spelling, and not for example switch from using

a British spelling of a word to an American spelling of the same word.