Scoring Guides

EQAO has made various practice materials available online to help you prepare for the OSSLT

Full scoring guides can be found in the Item-Specific Rubrics and Sample Student Responses for each year. Scroll down for these documents.

In the PDFs on this page, you'll find example responses for all kinds of questions on the OSSLT, and the rubrics that are used to code (i.e. score or mark) those answers. Each answer also has a short explanation about why it got the score it did.

How to use the Item-Specific Rubrics (or scoring guides)

1. Go to the Past Exams page and try doing some of the questions from one of the old OSSLT tests
2. Find the matching Item-Specific Rubric (scoring guide) and look at the rubric for that question
3. Now that you know what the test is looking for, go back to your answer and revise it (rewrite it if necessary)
4. Look at some of the other example answers that are provided and try to identify why they scored what they did
5. Mark your own answer. Try and figure out what code (i.e. mark) you would give it and why

2013 (May)

Scoring for the OSSLT is based on codes (think of these like levels).

These are what the rubrics look like for a few of the different kinds of writing tasks: