This State-of-the-Art review examines second language (L2) writing assessment research over the past 25 years through a framework of fairness, justice, and criticality. Recognizing the socio-political implications of assessment, the authors argue for a shift toward more equitable and socially conscious approaches. Drawing from a corpus of 869 peer-reviewed articles across leading journals, the review identifies five major themes: (1) features of writing performance, (2) rating and scoring, (3) integrated assessment, (4) teacher and learner perspectives, and (5) feedback. Each theme is reviewed for foundational findings, then critiqued through questions related to fairness and justice using a critical lens. The authors advocate for a multilingual turn in writing assessment, greater attention to teacher and student voices, and questioning dominant norms embedded in assessment practices. The review concludes with a call for future research to engage with fairness, justice, and criticality in both theory and practice, ensuring that writing assessments serve as tools for empowerment rather than exclusion.

Lexical proficiency is a multifaceted phenomenon that greatly impacts human judgments of writing quality. However, the importance of collocations’ contribution to proficiency assessment has received less attention than that of single words, despite collocations’ essential role in language production. This study, therefore, investigated how aspects of collocational proficiency affect the ratings that examiners give to English learner essays. To do so, collocational features related to sophistication and accuracy were manipulated in a set of argumentative essays. Examiners then rated the texts and provided rationales for their choices. The findings revealed that the use of lower-frequency words significantly and positively impacted the experts’ ratings. When used as part of collocations, such words then provided a small yet significant additional boost to ratings. Notably, there was no significant effect for increased collocational accuracy. These findings suggest that low-frequency words within collocations are particularly salient to examiners and deserving of pedagogic focus.