This article presents a study based on the correction of ENEM 2008 compositions using a new way of evaluating the students' writing skills. Each skill and its correction criteria was treated as five different items ranging from 5 to 7. This methodology allows to obtain the classical statistics, percentage of response by category and credit coefficient per category for each skill. It also allows the use of the item tri response theory in order to obtain a proficiency scale in ENEM's compositions. The adoption of this methodology allows to describe the candidates skills and abilities in the different levels of the scale, making possible to define the points in which the categories of response skills are dominated. The use of this methodology may improve the presentation of ENEM's results and it may also be useful for further studies of the compositions results. With this work, the authors intend to introduce a discussion on the use of the Tri in the correction of ENEM's compositions.
ENEM; Compositions correction and writing skills evaluation; Item Response Theory and Scale interpretation
