Linguistic discrimination in writing assessment: How raters react to African American “errors,” ESL errors, and standard English errors on a state-mandated writing exam

Raters of Georgia's (USA) state-mandated college-level writing exam, which is intended to ensure a minimal university-level writing competency, are trained to grade holistically when assessing these exams. A guiding principle in holistic grading is to not focus exclusively on any one aspect of writing but rather to give equal weight to style, vocabulary, mechanics, content, and development. This study details how raters react to “errors” typical of African American English writers, of ESL writers, and of standard American English writers. Using a log-linear model to generate odds ratios for comparison of essays with these error types, results indicate linguistic discrimination against African American “errors” and a leniency for ESL errors in writing assessment.

► Raters view kinds of writing errors differently. ► Raters of holistically-scored essays penalized African American English. ► Raters do not penalize ESL errors as severely as AAE errors.