Skills tested for ICAS Writing Years 3 to 12

ICAS Writing tests two forms of writing, narrative and persuasive, over time. Examples of persuasive tasks include reviews, advertisements, letters to a council, formal arguments (essays), opinion pieces for a newspaper, or a campaign manifesto. Examples of narrative tasks include the beginning, complication or conclusion of a narrative, or a description of setting or character.
Writing in ICAS competitions is marked on a common, criterion-referenced scale — all scripts, regardless of year level, are marked using the same criteria. The strength of the common scale is increased with the use of common tasks across year levels, making the scores that students achieve comparable with each other. This ability to make such direct comparisons can inform whole-school teaching strategies and programs.
Each marking criterion has a range of scores. Each score point describes the achievement of a skill level in that criterion. For example, at a score of 3, a student will have satisfied the standards described by scores 1, 2 and 3 but will not have demonstrated the standard described by score 4. In this sense, the scoring can be seen as cumulative. The fact that each score in each criterion describes a specific skill level enables students to assess their achievement and equips parents and teachers with diagnostic information to help develop students’ learning programs.
ICAS Writing assessments are marked against criteria specific to the task and every student’s work is assessed against the same marking scheme. Up to twelve marking criteria may be used. These may be divided into domains or sections, including: