Eighth Grade Education circa - 1895 - - (long)

[Carol]

-Potioncat:
> 
> I am impressed with the test. 
> 
> The questions were clear and direct. There wern't any oddly worded 
questions with even stranger choices for answers. The students could
answer in their own words with their own internal library of 
information. There one or two essays within the test and several more
questions with long answers.
> 
> This isn't like today's standardized tests to be graded by computer.
How long do you think it took teachers to grade the tests? 
> 
> Yep. Beats the heck out of tiny bubbles.
>
Carol responds:

With luck, they had no more than ten or fifteen students and had the
entire summer vacation to grade them! Seriously, at least the teachers
wouldn't have to make comments on the essays since the students
wouldn't see them again. I think that the tests "merely" determined
whether the kids could go on to high school but weren't returned to
them. They would only see the results for each subject. I have no idea
how long the teacher would have to return the tests and whether
similar tests were given to students in other grades. But if we're
talking about a one-room schoolhouse, he or she might have had only
about twenty students altogether.

BTW, I agree with you about the tests being a far better measure of
knowledge than computer-graded multiple-choice questions (even when
wrong answers are penalized to deter guessing). And the attempts to
measure a student's writing skills using a computer (length of
sentences, length of words, number of passive voice sentences and what
the computer perceives as spelling or grammatical errors) are just
abysmal. Nothing can replace an educated human reader to determine a
student's writing proficiency.

Sidenote here:
When I taught freshman composition, we graded the freshman placement
exams (determining whether they went into remedial, regular, or honors
composition) in two groups. Each group had a stack of essays to draw
from (finish one essay and take another from the stack) and when all
the essays had been read and assigned a number (1, 2, 3, or 4), we
switched stacks so that every essay was read at least twice. A 1 meant
that the essay was poorly written and the student definitely needed
remedial composition. A 2 meant that it was below average; the student
would survive regular composition but might benefit from a remedial
class. A 3 meant a solid essay, definitely a regular freshman comp
student. A 4 meant that the essay was exceptional, definitely honors
material.

Naturally, some degree of subjectivity was unavoidable. A split
reading (1/3, 2/4, even sometimes 1/4) meant that the essay got a
third reading by someone who hadn't read it the first time. a 1/3/4
essay would get a fourth reading! It was a pretty good system. I never
felt that any of my many students, and I taught more than a thousand
all told, had been assigned to the wrong class. A computer could never
do that, especially if it automatically graded essays with long
sentences and long words as "good." (Most of the bad writing I
encounter as a copyeditor is based on that same faulty assumption.)

Carol, who vividly remembers spending long nights in Village Inn with
a carafe of coffee and a pile of freshman essays to grade and wonders
how she managed to teach the next day