The Humanities and Interrater Reliability:A Response to R. Stephen RiCharde

摘要

As an assessment practitioner and a humanist with thirty years ofnexperience in teaching at a number of colleges and universities, I want tontake issue with R. Stephen RiCharde’s argument in his essay on the humanitiesnand interrater reliability in the July–August 2008 issue of Assessment Updaten(Volume 20, Number 4). And by extension, I want to suggest to Trudy Banta (seenher Editor’s Notes in the same issue) that she not temper her enthusiasm for rubrics.nUsed judiciously, they are as valuable in the humanities as they are anywhere else.nRiCharde suggests that the humanities’ historical commitment to a dialecticalnpedagogy, a “nonlinear” process that values disagreement and debate, is at odds withn“conventional linear methods” of learning measurement embodied most conspicuouslynin the demand that measurers maintain consensus about the value of the worknthey measure. But RiCharde’s analysis has a number of problems, several of whichnobscure the issues he takes up in a series of unhelpful reifi cations and misplacednemphases. I will try to expose those issues in a more useful way and thereby refocusnthe debate on the problems that more truly confront us as we conduct outcomesnassessment in the humanities and elsewhere.