Abstract.It is generally expected that students in higher education are able to write adequately for a wide variety of purposes and audiences. This assumption remains largely untested because current approaches to assessing writing abilities are typically impressionistic ratings of the overall quality of the text. This article puts forward the argument that a shift from impressionistic measures of assessment to criterion‐referenced measures provides a more detailed profile of the writing abilities of young adult writers. It suggests that the Staged Assessments in Literacy (SAIL) scheme, developed in the Department of Education of the University of Manchester and currently employed by the Joint Matriculation Board provides a useful model of a criterion referenced measure. The article provides evidence of the usefulness of the scheme in assessing the writing abilities of young adult writers in a multilingual educational setting in Zimbabwe.