How Accurate Are State
and National
Gradings of Student Writing?
By Jim Trelease © 2005,
2007
ith local,
state, federal, and national tests now incorporating essay
writing into the testing rubric, the evaluation process
is coming under expanded scrutiny. Who is going to do the
millions of evaluations (trained high school teachers),
how much time will they have to evaluate (1-2 minutes each),
and what criteria will be used (a rigid formula)?
Two excellent
online articles offer enlightening (and eye-opening) answers
to those questions and I offer brief excerpts here, with
links to the actual articles. By these experts' evaluations,
most state and national tests for good writers or writing
are going to be less accurate than your local weather forecaster.
First,
in the March, 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly under
the title "Would
Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?" three
executives with The Princeton Review,
the nation's premier test-prep company, give the background
for the change (California
threatened to drop the SAT unless an essay question was
included) and offer this hypothetical essay assignment:
Directions: Consider
carefully the following quotation and the assignment
below it. Then plan and write an essay that explains
your ideas as persuasively as possible. Keep in mind
that the support you provide—both reasons and
examples—will help make your view convincing
to the reader.
"Writing is the most
demanding of callings, more harrowing than
a warrior's, more lonely than a whaling captain's—that,
in essence, is the modern writer's message." — Melvin
Maddocks
Assignment: In
an essay, discuss your opinion of the quotation above.
Support your view with one or more examples from
literature, the arts, science, politics, current
events, or your personal experience or observations. |
The Atlantic authors
then offered as responses the work of famous writers (Hemingway,
Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, and Theodore
Kaczynski, the Unabomber). Each was evaluated
by SAT standards and given a grade. The Unabomber had
the highest score, by far. A five-minute NPR interview
with one of the article's authors can be heard (with RealAudio)
at: Grading
Hemingway the SAT Way.
uch like
the Atlantic authors, Edgar H. Schuster knows
the writing world from as many different perspectives as
one could hope for: former high school English teacher;
college English teacher, K-12 English supervisor, and textbook
author. His take on state and national writing tests is
one that deserves immediate attention. It will be especially
cogent for those educators who have been teaching the writing
process for the last dozen years and expect the tests to
vindicate the practice. They're in for a huge disappointment,
says Schuster.
In an article entitled "National
and State Writing Tests: The Writing Process Betrayed," in
the January 2004 issue of Phi Delta Kappan,
Schuster lists the principal steps embedded in the writing
process as used in most school districts:
- Planning;
- Drafting;
- Conferencing;
- Revising;
- Editing and Proofreading;
- Publishing.
Of all those criteria for successful
writing, Schuster reports only Drafting is
tested for on state and national essay tests. He then describes
how such tests fail to deal with one of those stages: Planning
or Prewriting:
| Oregon, which along with Kentucky is one of the most
writing process-friendly states in the nation, has
three 50-minute sittings spread over three days for
one prompt [essay assignment] and gives the students
even more time if they need it. However, it recently
had to eliminate its writing tests in three of the
four grades tested. Kansas, another progressive state,
allows four days, one hour per session per day, for
a single prompt. These states are unusual. As for national
tests, the College Board's achievement test in writing
allows 20 minutes to complete the test, five minutes
less than the NAEP. |
Schuster then takes a hypothetical
essay assignment and considers its complexity and how much
time a student would have to address it:
Appreciation
of music, paintings, books, and movies doesn't
make us into better people. In fact, it may actually
worsen us, diminishing our ability to respond
to actual situations and making it more difficult
to identify with the real world. As one scholar
said, "The voice in
the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent,
more real than the voice in the street outside."
You are to discuss and
support your opinion, using examples from literature,
the arts, science and technology, current events,
or your own experience or observation.
The literary critic Wayne Booth faced
this very issue and presumably did a great deal of
prewriting. He discovered that it is an extremely
complex question, but he worked through the writing
process to its end and produced The Company We Keep:
An Ethics of Fiction.2 It is over 500 pages long.
When we give students topics like this with a limited
time to complete the assignment, is it any wonder
they can't write proficiently? They are doomed to
superficiality.
Yet this was the sample topic
for the new SAT essay examination on the College
Board's web site. No wonder the College Board had
difficulty deciding how much time to give students
to complete the writing test. (The new optional ACT
test will allow 30 minutes.) |
Schuster's conclusion
is that the writing tests evaluate only one part of the
writing process — Drafting. He then offers
this concluding thought:
If
scores on NAEP writing tests have not improved
over the decades, is it possible that it's because
the tests are measuring drafting only and not writing?
Let's start a truth-in-labeling campaign. If your
state's writing tests betray everything you believe
about the writing process, lobby to have the department
of education change their name to state drafting
tests. It would be one step in the direction of getting
real about state standards. |
| INDEX for
all NCLB, NRP, and Reading First essays and articles |
