Essay Grades: An Interaction Between Graders' Handwriting Clarity and the Neatness of Examination Papers.

The article focuses on a study with the objective of determining whether all graders are influenced by the factor of essay neatness and whether an interaction exists between the writing clarity of graders and the neatness of the essay papers which they grade. It was hypothesized that graders who have neat, clear handwriting will unintentionally lower their evaluation of an essay containing near-illegible handwriting, whereas graders who are themselves messy handwriters will not subjectively penalize the student who turns in an essay containing messy writing. The results of this study indicate that an interaction exists between the handwriting neatness of a grader and the legibility of the essay paper which he wades. Specifically, this experiment shows that graders who have neat handwriting are biased by the neatness of an essay-biased in the direction of giving lower grades to essays that contain messy handwriting. Graders who have messy handwriting however, are not influenced by the neatness of essays. For those who continue to use essay examinations, certain precautions should be taken to lessen the effect of extraneous factors such as handwriting neatness.