Score

As part of the ongoing accreditation process, the college used a campus-wide writing assignment re: persistence v. ability, based on a quotation adapted from Tom Morris, True Success: A New Philosophy*. The students' writing task was to develop a point of view on the issue of persistence as more important than ability in determining a person's success.

There were 12 faculty members present, a blending of full- and part-time staff. The one prereq for attending was that if you gave the assignment, you had to participate in the holisitic scoring session, but 3 of the original dozen had to leave after the first 2 hours and 1 person came in for only the last hour. Other than that, we went through the norming process and then began the task. Although I don't have an accurate count of how many essays, I'm going to guess that there were probably 500-600, based on the stacks I saw.

Holisitic eval requires that the essay is read for focus on the writing task and development of relevant ideas and appropriate support, with the actual skills of writing a lesser part of the process. However, there were 2 scorers who were "grading" the papers by marking grammar, spelling, vocab and mechanical mistakes. Our task was simply to mark the appropriate class level for each essay based on the quality of the writing, and assign it a 1-2, 3-4, or 5-6 score.

Once the scoring panel got into its groove, the process ran smoothly. The only issue I saw develop was that one scorer consistently marked papers with a 5-6 that a second and, therefore, a third reader marked as a 1-2-3 paper. That is a wide discrepancy that shows that the 5-6 marker may have completely over-looked the skills aspect -- or is a teacher everyone wants as (s)he is probably an easy grader. I sat next to a man whose profession is lawyer and with whom I switched the first stack of papers. He and I scored identically on every essay save one, which he gave a 2 and I gave a 4. When I asked him why he scored it so low, he remarked that the writer didn't address the prompt, but when I pointed out the use of the key words in the thesis, as well as throughout the paper, he recanted and allowed the score to be a 3.

My observation is that there are far too few 5-6 essays, the quality that is necessary for college-level work across the curriculum that requires critical thinking and development of a thesis that is sustained with appropriate analysis and explanations. The majority of the essays scored 3-4, which is what used to be the expectation for a grade-level high school graduate. Far too many essays scored 1-2, which means these writers should not have high school diplomas, much less be attending college.

Some of the phrasing hit my funny bone, such as the writer of a 2 essay response whose goal is to become a "trama sergon," a goal I fervently hope is NOT achieved. A young man who arrived from China in September with limited English language skills wrote simply, "a single drop of water will go through rock," an understanding that is far beyond what so many students comprehend. This writer may not (yet) be able to express himself in English, but I'm going to guess that within a year, he'll be able to write rings around any of the other essays I scored, proving his point about persistence.

My final observation is that all but perhaps 10% of the papers were approached as personal narratives, a story all about I. The prompt should have led the writers to a discussion about persistence and ability, not about their own life struggles, because college writing demands objectivity and factual information. Personal experience can (sometimes) be used to augment an essay with support/examples, but the majority of the writing at the college level is factual and objective, not fictional and subjective. My major recommendation for the writing classes is more focus on the objectivity and development of factual examples and explanations and less emphasis on telling one's own story. The students who used these skills far outreached the rest, which paled in comparison because they became so commonplace.

When a teacher has high standards for students, the teacher gets the rep as being a hard-ass and websites (such as RateMyProfessor) tell students to avoid his/her classes. When students consistently fail to meet expectations, the expectations are lowered to accommodate the lack of ability. The students I served during the first 10 years of my career include some of the brightest and the best, students who have gone on in their lives to make a difference in a wide range of professions and arenas. During the second 10 years, I chose to work with the continuation kids, kids whose personal issues interferred with their school success, an assignment that remains the best teaching I've ever done.

My third 10 years were marked with roadblocks and failure in a school that refused to hold students accountable for any aspect of their education, beginning with the ability to speak English (even minimally). The site admin persistently condemned the teachers as failures who, if they could be fixed by yet another endless in-service presentation, might be able to keep their jobs. If students do not have to attend school, do not have to complete assignments, do not have to behave appropriately -- they don't, and the process falls apart, which it has done in my geographical area. And when the educational process does not demand that students speak English, we're done before we can begin.

Society can make all the excuses it wants for the failure of teachers to do their job, but until we regain the value of education as the basis for this country's future, and parents once again put their children's education as the number one FAMILY priority, it is talking to a brick wall. Paraphrasing Jim Morrison, it isn't that we don't need no education, it's that we don't got no education.

What does the staff do with the data and where do we go from here? I don't know. The product we receive every year grows less and less able/capable. Persistence cannot overcome the lack of ability unless/until the student is willing to take the hard-ass, well-qualified teacher's class and do whatever it takes to overcome the deficits in their educational preparation for a certification program, an AA degree, or a transfer program to a 4-year college/university. This isn't about the teacher, it's still about the student, and I know that the man from China is going to develop his ability to read, write, speak, listen and think in English because I already know, having met him once, that his inner core is strengthened with persistence. Whereas other students use their heritage language as an excuse to fail, he realizes that his language is his reason to succeed, and I suspect he will.

*"The biggest difference between people who succeed at any difficult undertaking and those who do not is not ability but persistence. Many extremely talented people give up when obstacles arise. After all, who wants to face failure? It is often said about highly successful people that they are just ordinary individuals who kept on trying, who did not give up."