How to add public anchors to an in-house task to obtain writing ages

In our Assessing Primary Writing (APW) national project, we automatically generate writing ages for the pupils based on the scaled scores that they achieve on the national writing scale. However, for in-house tasks, these writing ages are not automatically generated so we have an additional app that can do this for you - as long as you have added a set of our 'public anchors' to your task prior to judging. (The public anchors link the scores to our national scale of writing.)

  1. Add the public anchors to your in-house task

Anchor scripts are scripts from previous judging sessions which you can use in new judging sessions to make sure both judging sessions are on the same scale. This allows you to see the progress pupils are making between judging sessions.

We make public anchor sets available to subscribers of Assessing Primary Writing and Assessing GCSE English after our national judging sessions. The anchor sets consist of anchor scripts that span the range of the scale for a year group.

To use the public anchors, create your task as normal, printing out Coded sheets and uploading scans of completed answer sheets. Before you start judging, however, you need to add in our anchors.

When you click into your task from the task list and then click on Populate, generate, download & print coded sheets, it will take you to the Candidates page.

Click on the Anchors tab:

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You should see the public anchor sets listed, along with your own local anchor sets. Click on the Public Anchors anchor set you would like to use.

Once you've clicked on it, you can now see all the anchor scripts in a table on the right of the screen. You can see the Scaled Scores they were each awarded. Clicking on the name of the script (the 'Candidate' column) will let you see it.

Once you are happy that you wish to use the anchor set, click on the 'Add Anchor Set to Current Task' button. This will add all of these scripts to your in-house task, in this example the Assessing Primary Writing Year 3 anchors from 2019-20:

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When you return to your Candidates screen on your in-house task (by clicking the View tab) you will see that this set of public anchors has been added to it. This means that once you have completed your judging, the marks of your scripts will be on the same scale as these anchor scripts.

2. Carry out the task