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