This study examined the validity of the wholistic procedures used to evaluate the essays written by students in the Georgia University System as a part of the Language Skills Examination in the Georgia Rising Junior Testing Program. The plan of this study employed analytic procedures to evaluate a stratified random sample of the essays from the spring quarter of 1972. Sixty essays on one topic were selected, fifteen from each of the four ranks--1 (substandard), 2 (weak), 3 (good), and 4 (superior)--as assigned by the wholistic evaluation. The graders, raters in the wholistic evaluation, judged the essays on predetermined criteria of writing ability: organization, rhetoric, and mechanics. Following a trial run, the criteria definitions and rank descriptions were revised to provide clearer discrimination of the ranks. In the main evaluation, five graders used the revised definitions and descriptions to judge 40 essays, ten from each rank. Although the scores from the analytic evaluation were somewhat lower than those from the wholistic evaluation, the results of the study established four ranks of essay quality in keeping with the wholistic evaluation. (TO)