In my opinion, it’s quite difficult to choose whether to use
holistic or analytic marking in evaluating students’ work. This is because they
are two different things and are used for different purposes.
For holistic marking, the marking is evaluated for its overall quality whereas analytic
marking is done on separate criteria
such as grammar, content, voice and etc. Holistic marking assigns a single score to represent a
weighing of the whole work whereas analytic marking assigns different score to different factor.
Although teacher can evaluate
students’ writing faster using holistic marking,
it does not help in diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses, which means that
it does not help much in students’ further stages of learning. Meanwhile,
analytic marking helps to diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses. Hence,
teacher can know more about students’ performances and students will receive
more information about their writing.
For holistic marking, the teachers have to be extensively
trained to use the scale accurately (Brown, 2010). So, if I were to choose
between those two marking methods, I would prefer analytic marking since I’m a
novice teacher and not being able to mark papers as a whole without some guidance.
When I get more experience, I will switch to holistic marking, as it will save
a lot of time when marking piles of papers, especially during final
examination, where teachers are given limited time to mark the papers.
