ASSESSMENT OF UNIVERSITY ENTRY WRITING EXAMS: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

ABSTRACT This paper presents a reflection about the assessment of large scale writing tests. Although this research, in a broader perspective, is situated in the interface between text and discourse theories and educational assessment studies, this work is mainly focused on the textual and discursive analysis undertaken during the assessment of university entry writing exams. The concept of "gap" is analyzed, which operationalises the evaluation of the argumentative quality of essays in the scoring guide used by the Fundação para o Vestibular da Unesp (Vunesp). The concept of discursive ethos (Maingueneau, 2005, 2010) is the main theoretical notion mobilized for the analyses. The corpus comprises a set of essays produced by occasion of a highly competitive university entry exam. The objective is to demonstrate how the concept of gap works and how it is an example of evaluation parameter that responds to both criteria of applicability and theoretical robustness, a central demand for the elaboration of scoring tools for assessment of large scale writing tests.