Development of a Spanish generic writing skills scale for the Colombian Graduate Skills Assessment (Saber Pro)

While many higher education institutions list the generic skills their graduates are intended to acquire during a course of study (Barrie, 2006), the relevant skills are rarely directly assessed at graduation. In Colombia, exit assessment is compulsory for all post-secondary training and education. To this end, a Spanish-language version of the Australian Graduate Skills Assessment (GSA) was developed for the Colombian context. However, problems were identified with the reliability of the Spanish version of the GSA writing scale. This paper describes the process of replacing the original version of the Spanish-language version of the GSA scale (an intuitively based writing scale) with an empirically based scale developed using a question tree method. Forty raters constructed two holistic (combined trait) and three analytic (individual trait) writing scales using benchmarked scripts from a previous test administration. The five scales were then trialled. Comparison of the scales showed the eight-level holistic scale provided the widest distribution of scores. This research provides insights into generic writing skill testing for higher education graduates in Colombia. In addition, the study uniquely provides a detailed description of the development of empirically-based analytic and holistic scales for assessing the writing of Spanish-L1 speaking graduates in Colombia.