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Although there are studies on the pragmaticassessment, to date no research has been done on nativeEnglish raters’ criteria for the assessment of EFL learners’pragmatic competence. Focusing on this topic, this studypursued two purposes. The first one was to find the criteriafor rating the speech act of apology in L2 by native Englishteachers. The second was to investigate whether there wasrater bias in native English teachers’ rating of apology. Tothis end, 51 native English teachers rated six differentpragmatic situations for an apology discourse completiontask (DCT) which were accompanied by an L2 learner’sresponse to each situation. Besides rating, the raters wereasked to describe the way they rated the response to eachDCT situation. The content analysis of raters’ descriptionsrevealed five criteria they mostly applied in their rating:expression of apology, situation explanation, repair offer,promise for future, and politeness. FACETS was used tofind the rater bias. Results indicated that raters showeddifferent degrees of severity and leniency in their ratings,which contradicts the myth of native speakers being abenchmark in language assessment, including pragmatic assessment