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History

Beginning in the last two decades of the 20th century use of holistic scoring somewhat declined. Other means of rating a student's writing competence, perhaps more valid, were becoming popular, such as portfolios. College were turning more and more to testing agencies, such as ACT and ETS, to do scoring of writing samples for them, and by the first decade of the 21st century those agencies were doing some of that by automatic essay scoring. But holistic scoring of essays by humans is still applied in large-scale commercial tests such as the GED, TOEFL iBT, and GRE General Test. It is also used for placement or academic progression in some institutions of higher education, for instance at Washington State University. For admission and placement into writing courses, however, most colleges now rely on the analytical scoring of writing skills in tests such as ACT, SAT, CLEP, and International Baccalaureate.