“School spirit is people worshipping the school or something like that.“
Quickly and confidently, I scored that student’s written submission a 1/1/2 and moved on to the next. Most aren’t that short, but it’s part of scoring English essays for standardized tests.
While make-do working at Meijer, I eagerly awaited this contract to finally begin. It was the first time I had a normal schedule since the last time I was with this organization, two years ago, free from weekend work and pre-dawn hours. Better yet, this was a work-from-home job, so my commute was only three rolls out of bed to the office nook I carved out my closet.
I again contracted with a company that ‘evaluates’ standardized tests in Missouri. Assigned to fourth grade last time, I had eighth graders this year. Some team members were weaned out, and others added late, but there were around 20 Test Scorers for the project, and our crew had about six weeks to ‘grade’ 75,896 English prompts for the state.
Skipping our onboarding process, once I logged into the company’s Scoreboard system, a student’s paper would load. Each one had its own 10-digit “Lithocode” to identify it, without location, student or school names. We’d score and submit one and the next would pop up. For the first week or so, we were encouraged to push for 100 papers a day. Then, after getting in the swing of things, we were expected to mark around 150 each day. While this averages out to spending about 2.5 minutes per submission, the time evened out. The good responses, rewarding for this former teacher, along with the ones that had us questioning our final scores, were balanced with short and obvious ones.
This is what the kids saw when they moved onto the written English portion of their test:
Narrative Writing Prompt: You have entered a student writing contest for a local newspaper in which you are asked to write the next chapter of “School Spirit.”
Write a narrative for the newspaper’s contest that continues the story of “School Spirit.” Include narrative statements such as sensory details, dialogue, figurative language, and description, as appropriate in your writing. Use details and ideas from the passage in your narrative.
Missouri then provided the students a ‘chapter’ beginning a story about two young trumpet players. Ethan is the more talented of the two, and Mason, our narrator, also plays on the school’s basketball team. Mason’s coach challenged him to perform the school song before the season’s last home game. The two boys practice at Ethan’s house for Ethan’s grandpa to get ready for the big night.
From here, the students writing their essays could continue this any way they wanted. As long as they mentioned school, basketball, trumpet, students, a coach, grandpa, or school spirit itself, their paper was scoreable, even if they only wrote a few words. They weren’t forced to go on with the story provided, they could also write about themselves or their own thoughts of school spirit or whatever else they came up with. I had codes to follow if something wasn’t scorable, and truly earning an “Off-Topic” flag was remarkably difficult.
You may be surprised how frequently Grandpa died. He had a lot of heart attacks, among other ailments. Aliens did visit, but only a couple of times. Guns and shootouts also, but nothing ‘concerning.’ Action flick stuff. (Rare and playful, these usually got good scores. They put time into writing one sentence about it, so at that point, why not have some fun?)
I’m glad, because the students should be given such leeway, and sometimes they did great. I tried to reward the kids who came up with their own take on the prompt. (Sometimes, even the really bad papers did the same.)
Honestly, it was fun work. Monotonous and arbitrary at times, yes, but fun. Seeing how the kids think, or didn’t think, along with their childish mistakes, was consistently entertaining. Easy to find highlights throughout my shift.
The kids had two hours to work on the English paper I’d score, I was told. They had no access to their phones or other online help as they worked on school computers. My remote colleagues and I graded submissions on three metrics. We weren’t able to add any comments for the students or their teachers, and our scores were the final ones given.
Start with Purpose and Organization (PO). Here, we were supposed to look at the story’s basic plot and structure. Does one exist? Does it have a beginning, middle, end? Setting and characters? Does the story make sense?
I was told to look at PO as evaluating ‘the story,’ and for Development and Elaboration (DE), I judged the ‘storytelling,’ how the students used language, grammar, word choice, and their (unlikely) use of metaphorical language or dialogue for their overall style, the flavor of the story.
Pro Tip: PO ‘never’ outranks DE. If the kid doesn’t develop the story enough, there’s not much to elaborate on. PO and DE almost always match, and they’re supposed to almost always match, per our training. From prior experience, if I came across what I thought was a “split score,” I’d ask my ‘manager’ for feedback on my gut feeling. With my experience, I only asked when they really were on the edge. (Always of promotion. I never asked to downgrade one.) A decent estimate, he ‘allowed’ maybe 40% of my split-score hunches. The company leaned downward. Tie goes to the r̵u̵n̵n̵e̵r̵ lower score.
Both PO and DE were scored on a scale of 1-4, with 4 the highest. No decimals, no plus/minus, no shade between any score. The 2s were the most common, about 37% of all submissions. In these papers, to use our rubric’s description, something about the story is “uneven” or “missing.” The characters are empty cutouts who merely verb, the setting is unclear, or the ‘story’ doesn’t go anywhere. Often, papers like this were just a series of incidents. Simple sentences.
With a 1 paper, the kid likely only wrote a few lines and nothing could be developed. ‘Wanting to quickly finish this stupid test’ seemed to play a role in some of their answers, I reckon.
Pro Tip: We were told a paper needed at least “four lines,” maybe 150 words, to qualify for a 2 in PO/DE.
Just as the eighth grader submitted it, errors included, this was only 2.5 lines of text in our system and it earned a rare split score of 1/2/2. This kid can obviously do more than this, but chose not to, ran out of time, or something else got in the way:
The gymasuim buzzed with the echoes of the pep rally. Confetti still danced in the air like shimmering ghost, and the scent of popcorn lingered, a sweet reminder of the excitement that had filled the room just moments ago. As the last students trickled out, a small group remained, their faces eched with determination.
Damn, kid! That’s it?! You had something going! Something really good! I saved this oddity because it’s so odd. Too short to earn higher than a PO 1, and I could only reward the DE one higher. So it goes.
In our scoring rubric, a 3 is described as “adequate,” which is too harsh a word. These are pretty good papers, showing the kid is on the right path with their understanding of language and how to use it to construct and organize ideas. These essays were 27% of all scored, and they had all the right parts of a story, regardless of how they chose to continue it. “AP-Style” was another term used to describe them; the kid could clearly tell the story they wanted to tell. They got the job done, but even lower ones could show the kid knew what they were up to. Higher-end 3s could be remarkably clever and well written, but they were missing just a little something to keep them from a 4.
Only 12% of papers were elevated to this highest tier. These could be an awful lot of fun to work on. Most were genuinely good. Often 1,000 words or more, these papers had to be “consistently exceptional.” It wasn’t enough for them to show a flash of brilliance here or there. Every description, revelation of characters’ emotion or state, the direction of the story, along with the correct use of advanced language and grammar to express these ideas, all needed to be exceptional to earn that 4. (Eighth grade exceptional, mind you.)
A solid clue to determine a 3 or 4 was their use of dialogue, which was required in our scoring rubric. Simple “Yes/no” and other curt uses could weaken a paper’s impression, but the lack of any quotations was enough to dock a would-be 4 down to a 3, I learned to my displeasure.
“Conventions” was our last metric. Mostly punctuation, periods and capitals, but also spelling and grammar. Unlike the others, the students could receive a 0, 1 or a 2. With disturbingly lenient scoring, 80% of students received a 2. Spelling didn’t matter much, but excessive run-on sentences and more could add up. The general rule was that the score is docked to a 1 only if the cumulative effect of the errors “impeded reading.” (According to my employer, it’s very difficult to impede reading.)
Of the 2,973 essays I graded, I never once gave a 0 for Conventions. If something deserved it, it likely got flagged for another code, perhaps “K,” which included keybashing, along with direct copying from the prompt they were given.
The student at the start of this piece? Well, a quick guess on what “school spirit” is was good enough for the kid, I s’pose. It isn’t a story, so a 1 for PO, the same for DE, but it’s got a period at the end! So, it’s a 1/1/2!
Management had two ways to keep an eye on the scorers’ accuracy. For one, they slipped Validity papers into our batch, carefully vetted to ‘clearly’ fit the rubric they trained us on. Without knowing which papers these were, we each scored ten of them per day. Once, I was called into a private call with my scoring manager about three ‘mistakes’ I’d made on these. We had a reasonable chat, and he confirmed something that always was in the back of my mind: I was being too generous. We talked about two papers that were on the border and why I should’ve been more strict. On the other hand, he told me another scorer had been too harsh on their papers. The last one we talked about was one I’d scored as high as I could. He told me “to not worry about this one,” because he agreed with me, pointing out the work’s strengths and saying he’d do the same. Officially, however, that paper was a notch lower.
Their other way to find out which Scorers to cull was ‘double scoring,’ or “2x” papers. Some amount of student papers would be marked by two different scorers to see if we agreed. In these, management wasn’t too concerned with “Adjacent” papers, when papers were scored only one point apart. (Their data on this did help me check to see if I was being too strict or generous.) They really cared if the scores were “Non-Adjacent,” meaning the scores were at least two points apart. In our small rubric’s range, two points was a massive and obvious difference. I never had a non-adjacent score, and those who did had (I’m sure) a less reasonable chat with their scoring director.
In our total numbers, my 86% Validity and 2x scores were perfectly in line with company goals. Our team finished scoring in just under six weeks, during which I worked a few Saturdays to stay in Meijer’s system. When I restarted, this time, I was sent to the receiving bay to unload grocery and General Merchandise pallets. Despite walking ~11 miles a day and moving many (fairly) heavy things around, it really may be the most chill job I’ve ever had.
(More on that, later.)
During this contact, I was wise to save my favorites throughout each day, the impressive ones, the funny and (in one way or another) revealing ones. I want to share these with you, though I’m not sure if I should tell you my final score first, or if it should be a guessing game…
Remarkably biased, I’m flagging my own post as an ‘I’ for “Insufficient to score.” The PO and DE are there, I mentioned school spirit, and Conventions don’t impede reading, but I struck out on the two-hour time limit. Damn!
Never boring, I’ll send in individual essays or batches to show you more. For now, I’ll send you off with a short 1/1/2. Yes, even this got full marks for Conventions:
school spirit is going to be about a guy ho die and rip head off.
I was bitterly disappointed in the internet when after Fauci made his little “I am the science” rant that no one turned it into a Judge Dredd style meme. I brought it up to someone this morning and decided to search if somewhere out there someone hadn’t done it. But it doesn’t appear so.
But Google’s AI seemed to like. A simple search of “Fauci I am the science judge dredd” produced the following:
When the singularity occurs and the AI takes over, I think it will remember this moment in its growth. And we will all pay a price.
I have no idea what I have wrought on the world.
We call science that one is not allowed to criticize, “propaganda.”
Now do one about Firsts.
I expect Conan the Barbarian levels of savagery.
school spirit is going to be about a guy ho die and rip head off.
I wonder what school little STEVIE SMITH went to?
That paean to illiteracy got the highest possible score in ‘Conventions?’
Yes. To be fair, that one’s not too bad, considering the alternatives. I gave full marks to shit I’d never give such to, were I in charge.
(I’m not.)
Huh. I always wondered how these things were graded.
I asked and was just told other teachers. I have to admit when I saw Evan posting that he was grading this stuff now it made me laugh.
I mean, I know he did teach in Korea. But the average person I went to college with was a moron and I wouldn’t trust them to even understand the rubric and follow it even if they actually were trying.
When we started, we had an awful lot of African-African names in my scoring group. During work meetings, their accents matched their names. Many of them were culled, for whatever reason. There were also a few old women, telling by their voices, and not all of them made it. I wonder if they didn’t keep up, were too inaccurate with validity metrics, or if they just quit.
IMO, they did a good job training us. To again be fair, it was my second time working with them and I already knew what I was doing, but I also have zero trust in college-‘educated’ folk, particularly within ‘my’ Millennial grouping.
I figure, for the $18/hr remote, 35hr/wk gig, folk were keenly eager to keep their ‘new’ bosses happy. Though, we did have x# of culled folk, likely for incompetence or being slow, and y# added to fill the slack.
They started doing more and more standardized writing tests when I was in school. I feel like that’s when it really took off and joined the SAT’s. I remember questioning a score I got on one test.
I did pretty mediocre on the portion of the SAT for writing. I had a 1450 on the math and reading with no study or prep of any kind. 600 on the writing.
I loath the idea of subjective grading in school. I did godawful on one test in the 6th grade because I misunderstood the prompt and kind of just wrote my own thing in the wrong format. The male teacher next door (the two classes were like adjoined and students traded off between the two teachers – one a tall, balding middle aged man named Mr. Madore and the other Edna Krabappel come to life – single at 40 and overweight and constantly trying to lose weight by smearing gobs of peanut butter on rice wafers as a diet) stood up in front of the class and ranted on how he was going to report one of us to get mental health because they apparently thought that everything about society was wrong. In general he was just pissed because the class’s scores sucked and it made them look like shit.
I treated it like a creative writing exercise instead of a structured essay. Can’t remember what format they wanted specifically at this point.
Maybe if they didn’t kick me out of class every other day I would have known!
“I had a 1450 on the math” On math alone?! You took the newfangled SATs with their new scoring?! 1600 used to be the top back in *my* day, and I’m younger than most of y’all. Mom got a 1410, I got 1360, Dad famously (to him, pre-ordained failure) got 980, and Colin got a 12-something. (In his alley, he’s likely the smartest of us all, but he doesn’t know or care about history. I’m not sure how good he’d be on an essay.)
Ha! Autocorrect tried to change “On math alone” To “On Martha alone.” Which. Well. I guess better than a gang-bang, but I don’t know Martha. (Martha WASHINGTON?! Uh. I’m sure tempting, but I wouldn’t dare cross George. But, hey! Maybe he just fucked her twice and stepped away from the position?)
Huh. Thing I just learned: “George Washington had no biological children of his own. He did, however, help raise his wife Martha’s two children from her previous marriage, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis.” That’s, that’s quite interesting.)
Math and reading combined. I thought there was a typo, but I wrote that. So when I took it it was still max of 800 per category, but they had just added in the writing portion which is where I kind of sucked or was average.
So 700+ on the two old school parts.
Thing is I’m not a bad writer. I do well on papers and can crank shit out almost as fast as I First, but I always seemed to struggle on the standardized tests by comparison to everything else.
Roger. I misread.
I looked it up on Google, and it said there were some major changes in 1995. So my 1270 in 1989 would have been a 1340 to 1370 today.
If you had asked me about school spirit when I was in jr high I would have not understood the question as such a thing didn’t exist. I was forced to be there seven hours a day.
In high school I would have said it was something the football players and the theatre freaks did. I lettered in academics, leave me out of your purple and gold BS.
This right here.
The title of the chapter the kids were given about Ethan and Mason was called “School Spirit.”
Very few of the kids actually wrote ‘about’ (the mysterious notion of) school spirit, though some did. Mostly wrote about two kids practicing trumpet with grandpa before the final home basketball game, as they ‘should’ have.
Who wants a kitten?
I’ve got three, grey females, eight weeks old yesterday.
Three people that said they want one have backed out. Losers.
Real libertarians sell orphans. How am i going to use a kitten to automate my Firsting process?
I can’t afford H-1B’s.
Kittens attract orphans.
They are bait.
School Spirit is the ghostly remnants of the students driven to death by boredom working to the lowest common denominator.
+1 group projects.
Beat that tin drum, little wind-up monkey
Extreme heat could be a mark of many Independence Days in the future, experts say. Climate change, caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, is making heat waves hotter and longer. The average number of heat waves in the U.S. has doubled since the 1980s.
“It’s not an anomaly. It’s a preview,” said Michael Rawlins, associate director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In six months Earth will be a lifeless cinder, according to science.
A bar mitzvah is shul spirit.
A school spirit needs to be quick and easy enough for the students to handle. Can’t spend years barrel aging. So, a basic vodka is the ticket.
Such a bizarre job. I had no idea such things were remotely graded.
You just wait until they offshore this shit to India. The guy answering your phone call on one line and scamming your Grandma on the other will be grading your son’s standardized writing test all at the same time.
They’ll just skip straight to AI scoring the papers.
In the future, it will be AI grading it, and only kids who are good at sounding like AI will get a 4.
The people that bloviated and turned what would be a one page of concise and logical paper into a 14 page pile of LinkedIn sounding BS will be our masters.
I thought they just threw the papers down the stairs and graded based on how far the paper went.
Pretty sure it’s another covid gift.
I chimed into a pro-abortion post on Reddit (is there any pro-choice shit on Reddit?). Some genius chimed in with this:
Countries that don’t make abortion a legal issue generally have fewer abortions than those that restrict it.
To which I said:
Countries that don’t make owning guns a legal issue generally have fewer shootings than those that restrict it.
See? I can say shit, too.
This prompted…this:
Well considering guns are solely created for the destruction of other beings, this is a piss poor argument.
A better argument would be: you don’t see countries restricting viagra, therefore viagra isn’t really an issue.
See? That’s what logic is. Now you try again!
It’s sad because this is the sort of gotcha a retarded 14 year old would have said when I was growing up, but now it’s coming from them as adults.
There are a lot of 14 year olds on reddit.