ACT Obsession + Standardized Writing and Rubrics

According to the Casper Star Tribune Wyoming has passed a new law requiring that all high school juniors take the ACT. In fact, the state dispersed one voucher to each high school junior which will allow him to take the test for free. This could be a positive thing, since the ACT won’t waste anymore of the students’ money, but unfortunately, some Wyoming kids are still obsessed with taking the test a thousand times:

“An ACT college entrance exam score of 26 may be outstanding for some students, but for high school junior Todd Cheney it’s not good enough. The 17-year-old junior at Kelly Walsh High School is hoping to beat his brother’s score of 31 when he uses his state voucher to retake the ACT for free during the June 9 testing. He also plans to continue to take the test as a senior if he doesn’t beat his brother’s score this time.”

My ACT score was lower than my big sister’s score, but I didn’t retake the test. I guess we never had the intelligence feud in my family. Unfortunately, if Cheney can’t get his score above a 31, he is going to have to face the fact that he’s just not as smart as his brother. After all, that is what standardized testing measures, right?

Many students stress out over preparation for the ACT. I recall my parents forcing me to take a three hour prep course. I also recall doing practice problems in a study guide which was the size of a phone book. I never stopped to realize that standardized tests are given to measure a student’s aptitude, not how much information she can cram the week before the test. A few Wyoming girls are cramming for the April 14th test right now. Fortunately, they don’t have to pay any money to waste 3 hours of their lives:

“Erin Lund, 17, and Jordan Merback, 16, both juniors at Kelly Walsh, are also preparing for the test. Lund has been preparing by reading ACT books from the school library, and she took the ACT practice test. She also took the PSAT last year. ‘You can never really be fully prepared for this,’ she said.”

Unfortunately, the voucher doesn’t cover the ACT plus test, which includes the new writing portion of the ACT. Teachers now have to push students into a standard way of writing in addition to a standard way of learning everything else. How are teachers standardizing students’ writing techniques? The answer, according to Alfie Kohn is the common classroom occurrence of rubrics. Teachers often give their students a rubric as a guideline for their papers. However, rubrics can severely limit a student’s quality of writing based on how detailed that rubric is.

“Mindy Nathan, a Michigan teacher and former school board member… realized that students presumably have grown accustomed to rubrics in other classes, and now seemed ‘unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned point value’” (Kohn 13).

If that isn’t harmful enough to the student’s education in writing, Nathan also said that the rubrics ultimately cause students to “not have confidence in their thinking and writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks” (Kohn 13). I suppose if standardized writing tests become more common among high school students, we are probably going to see an increase of rubrics, which ultimately guide students to write standard papers that will all sound alike. In actuality, the situation can be simplified with a claim made in Kohn’s article by writer Marilyn French:

“‘Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning’ whereas ‘most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds these two are very nearly opposites’” (Kohn 14).

Sources:
Casper Star Tribune – “Students use vouchers to take ACT for free”

Kohn, Alfie, “The Trouble with Rubrics”, English Journal, March 2006, VOl. 95(4), pp 12-15 Read the PDF File

Do You Know Your Punctuation (insert question mark here)

You’re a high school English teacher, inevitably getting kids ready for the standardized writing tests they are about to take. A reporter approaches you outside the school building and asks: “What is the most important thing in writing effectively?” Obviously, I’m not a teacher yet, but I could probably envision myself saying something like “syntax,” “overall organization,” or “imagination.” However, I would be in for a rude awakening because apparently, high-schoolers are having a really tough time figuring out how to use punctuation.

According to an article by the East Bay Daily News, recent statistics show that “less than 60 percent of incoming freshman [at Diablo Valley College] tested at remedial levels in English.” Now, colleges are running development writing courses which are designed to help these students catch up. The report also shows, what I think is a very strange response regarding the most important thing about writing effectively:

“College instructors ranked punctuating the end of a sentence correctly as the 2nd most important thing in writing effectively. High school teachers ranked that skill as the 31st most important thing.”

I always figured that students mastered the art of punctuation in elementary school. But apparently, this isn’t just a freak incident which took place at DVC. In fact, most colleges look for very different skills than those which high school instructors are teaching students:

“Teachers at all levels value organized, coherent writing from their students. But college professors more often rated punctuation as paramount, the study says, while high school teachers placed more importance on developing a topic and writing a great introductory paragraph.”

Personally, I had a different experience regarding high school writing versus college writing. College writing has never been particularly focused on the grammatical issues within my papers. In college, content is key. Now, many schools are taking a different approach to improve the weaknesses of freshman college students:

“Professor Alison Warriner of Cal State East Bay serves on a state task force to improve writing at the high school level. In 2005, state superintendent of public schools Jack O’Connell created a council to foster relationships between educators at the preschool, K-12 and college levels.”

So how do standardized writing tests help this issue? One might assume that skills obtained in high school are ones which ready students for standardized tests, and standardized tests play a large role in admission to college. Therefore, in a perfect world, a student who passes a standardized writing test should be ready for college writing as long as she knows how to use her semi-colons and commas. Too bad this isn’t the case.

The actual study which was reported by the Contra Costa Times can be found here.

Sources:
East Bay Daily News - Study: “High school, college learning divide continues”

Contra Costa Times – “High school instruction, college needs unmatched”