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Grading This Article? First, Take Time to Learn the Rules
BY TAMAR LEWIN PARSIPPANY, N.J. - We start the morning with a packet of sample papers, on which students have had 20 minutes to respond to the statement "The world is getting better all the time." There are papers on technology, medical advances, politics, the birth of a cousin, the destruction of the "o-zone layer" - and a whole lot on the war in Iraq and the terror attacks of Sept. 11. Some are two paragraphs, some are more than two pages. Some offer platitudes, some discuss literary examples, some are personal narratives. We silently grade six papers, and the trainer asks us to raise our hand if we gave a particular paper a 6, a 5, a 4, etc. There is stunning unanimity - except for me. Only a handful of the high school and college teachers grading the SAT II writing test are even one grade off from what the trainers assigned when they chose the sample papers. Most have been scoring such papers for years, and they know a 6 from a 5, no sweat. Given 25 years making a living writing for newspapers, I came in thinking that I, too, would know good writing. I also came in quite skeptical that readers could be trained to adhere to objective grading standards on something as emotionally subjective as writing. That will soon be a crucial question for millions of high school students: starting in two years, the two million college applicants who take the SAT each year will be required to produce a sample essay. Although some details, like whether they will have 25 or 30 minutes for the essay, remain to be resolved, it is clear that the new test will be much like the current SAT II writing test. And while the College Board, which has used the Educational Testing Service to score the SAT II, will use NCS Pearson to grade the new writing test, that process, too, will be similar. At my grading session, about 100 teachers from across the country are being paid $22 an hour to grade the 33,000 essays produced at the May 3 SAT II writing test. Each essay is read by at least two graders, so over the five days, each one will be plowing through some 660 essays. Our instructions don't help me much: Ignore the handwriting. Read holistically, not analytically. Do not reread. Read supportively, and grade what's there, not what's missing. If the paper is absolutely illegible, or completely off topic, give it to your table leader. Read the whole thing before making any judgment, since some papers improve greatly once the student gets going. Remember these are children, and they had only 20 minutes to write. And remember, even if this is the 90th paper you're reading on the war in Iraq or Sept. 11, it's the first for the writer. Morning and afternoon, at each grading session, scorers start with a set of "calibration" essays, to make sure their judgment is still in tune with the standards. I give the same bad grades as everybody else. But I am way off on the good ones. I give a 3 to the paper that the experienced readers saw as the model of 6-ness. It begins with the sentence, "The world has taken a turn for the worst." I am put off by "worst" where it should have said "worse" - and by the way the writer talks about political correctness and homogenization, without ever explaining how they make the world worse. At my table of seven, the leader, Marilyn Collins, congratulates the other graders, who have been exactly right on the samples - except for one man who confesses that he flipped the 5 and the 6. "Did you see the error of your ways?" the table leader asks gently, laughing. We go through three sets of samples at the initial morning training. Everyone is impressively in sync. I remain bewildered. While the others begin plowing through the piles of tests in pink folders on each table, I sit down with the trainers to see if I can discover the error of my ways. They explain that I should not have been put off by the first sentence, that it's just a beginning stutter, to be overlooked. And, they say, what makes it a 6 is the sophisticated use of language, the organization and the lively, detailed examples, one about Clear Channel Communications and how it prevented its radio stations from broadcasting Rage Against the Machine after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the other about how the New York Regents exams had been sanitized for political correctness. They go back over the standards with me: a 6 demonstrates clear and consistent competence, and is well organized and fully developed, with a variety of sentence structures, a range of vocabulary and only occasional errors. A 4 shows adequate competence, with some errors in grammar or diction and minimal sentence variety. We talk about several papers where my assessment was radically out of line. Generally, I seem to be looking for some attempt to deliver a full disquisition on whether the world is getting better, while they are looking for competent writing that glances at the larger question, even if only through the characters in "A Streetcar Named Desire." What is most helpful to me is a particularly cryptic piece of advice: "We sometimes say you have to grant the "is-ness" of the paper," said Dr. Agnes Yamada, an English professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. It works. I return to the ballroom, grade 32 more sample papers in the next hour, and discover that I have entered the SAT mind-set, that I am reliably in line with the standards, varying from the assigned grade on only four papers, and only by one point. I now know a 6 from a 5. But I'm not sure this is a good thing. I have lost all memory of my old criteria for judging writing, the ones I walked in with. And I have no idea whether the world is getting better. |
