Somewhere every June, in the far dark corners of the earth, a unique gathering happens: over 1,000 high school and college English teachers from across the United States meet to score AP English exams. It’s a mysterious part of my career that has consumed nine days of my life every summer for ten of the past twelve years.
Naturally, participating in such an event raises a lot questions from my colleagues and friends: What do you do there? How many essays do you read? How many hours per day do you read? Are the essays handwritten? What are the essays like? Do you get any weird essays? Do you enjoy it?
My responses, in summary, go something like this: Read and score, all day long. About 250 essays per day, for seven straight days. From eight to five, with two snack breaks and a lunch. Yes, handwritten indeed—and painfully so. They’re all very…similar. Oh, yes, we get weird essays; we love those ones. Do I enjoy it? Ask me three months after I’m done.
That last response is telling. If I’m right honest (and most educators I talk to while there openly agree), it’s sort of a painful exercise. While everybody reads and scores the essays at a slightly different pace, my pace is very common: I read roughly one handwritten essay every two minutes for eight hours each day for seven straight days. That amounts to about 1,600 scored essays in a week (we do spend some time training and normalizing each day). In total, the thousand or so teachers present score, we’re told, 1.5 million essays over the course of the week. It’s not exactly tantalizing work. It’s rigorous; it’s tiring; it’s…monotonous. It’s also consistent and controlled. We sit in tables of nine people, with one table leader that tracks our pace and accuracy. There are question leaders that train and motivate us to stay on pace and to not fall behind (or else there will be mysterious consequences). And the rooms we score in are highly refrigerated (er…air conditioned…to the point where we have to wear sweaters and jackets) to help keep us from getting drowsy.
I haven’t really been able to pin down why I, personally, have been drawn to come back every year. Oh, sure, we do get paid. But it’s pittance if you calculate the nine days it takes to fly there, work a full, intense, seven days, and fly home. We also get fed well, but it’s cafeteria-style and certainly nothing to write home about (on the contrary, actually, much of the food there reminds me of a cheap summer camp.) There is a unique draw to it, though. It’s interesting. It’s unique. And I feel like I’m doing a service to the high school kids who paid for and stressed a great deal to take this test—all in hopes of earning a little college credit at a highly discounted rate. And, as a college educator in the United States, I do find it fascinating to see how the American teenage mind works; how our secondary education system is preparing them for college (and, more importantly, life); and what this whole process says about what we value in education and how our students respond to it.
I’m one voice among millions of educators, of course, but I can’t help but reflect on what this entire process says about American teaching and how the system in which we educated affects the way our young people think and act. I don’t have anything particularly negative to say about the CollegeBoard or Educational Testing Services (ETS), the organizations that run the AP exams. Their ability to manage massive, large-scale nationwide exams and effectively train educators to score them consistently and fairly is remarkable. But the process has made me a bit of a critic about our educational system overall. In many ways, I think this testing process is a microcosm of what we value in education.
As such, I wanted to share nine takeaways from my most recent experience scoring the AP English exam last month.
Takeaway #1: For Good or for Bad, American Education Highly Values Exams
It probably goes without saying that standardized testing is the modus operandi of the American educational system. If you’ve ever been in public school or college in any capacity, you can probably quickly recognize most, if not all, of these acronyms immediately: GRE, ACT, SAT, TOEFL, DIBELS, AP, LSAT, GMAT. We love our exams. But being in a room with over 1,000 educators, all simultaneously scoring the same exam that includes over 1.5 million essays reinforces the American love for standardization. (And, mind you, I only scored the AP English Language exam—there are also AP English Literature, Psychology, Chemistry, European History, Statistics, Music Theory, and dozens of other subjects and also being scored at the same time.)
There is one fundamental reason among many that I have concluded as to why standardized testing is so prevalent: it’s easy to assess. For college and university admissions, there is nothing easier for admittance purposes than reviewing a simple test score and a GPA. For educators at any level, one of the easiest ways to give grades is by simply giving tests. If it can be scored with a scantron, after all, it doesn’t require any feedback. Of course, that’s not the only reason why we like standardized tests (some would argue that they help assure that pre-determined, paradigmatic knowledge can be more easily and safely passed down to students if they’re all learning the concepts that experts in the field deem necessary for competency), but it’s likely that’s the reason why it has lasted and strengthened as an assessment mechanism for so long.
Whether you love them or hate them, standardized tests are at full strength. In their ubiquity, and because of the level at which they are appreciated at the college admittance level, there is likely no end in sight for them on a large scale.
Takeaway #2: If You Have to Score 1.5 Million Essays, There Probably Is No Better Way
Of course, all that said, if you must conduct a standardized test in which over 500,000 students write the same three essays in order to receive college credit, I can’t think of another way in which it might work better. In order to establish consistency, and to allow for some degree of error while still remaining fair, the essays are scored on a 0 – 9 point scale. To ensure reader reliability, all educators present are trained on a clear rubric that identifies key areas where essays rise or fall on the scale. After some fairly rigorous training, the consistency among graders is remarkably high—much higher than I would think would be normally possible considering the often highly subjective nature of writing and communication. Scores are then calculated, in an algorithm that combines three essays, plus a multiple choice part. The sum total gives a score that is then compared against all test-takers that year (to compensate for complexity of the exam questions that particular year) and then a final 1 – 5 score is given.
In a process as ambiguous as grading written essays, it is nothing short of amazing that so many essays can be scored with so much consistency. The process is designed to weed out grader subjectivity and it does a fairly exceptional job at doing so. If we ever thought that standardized tests remove creativity from students, there is no question that the scoring of them likewise removes real critical assessment from educators.
Takeaway #3: Timed Exams Are Stressful. And Probably Unrealistic.
As I would read through these essays, I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of the students—students who have been pushed and prodded to pass these tests (that they pay roughly $94 to take, to boot.) They are asked to write three effective essays (not perfect, mind you, but thorough and complete) in two hours, all by hand (several students actually wrote, in their exam, that their hands hurt while writing the essays). Imagine this! Students are asked to write, with a pen, for 120 minutes straight—40 minutes per essay—without a break. They have to read three prompts, several citation sources, and a short passage (usually a speech or letter), and then they have to formulate three separate essays, one that synthesizes sources; one that rhetorically analyzes content; and one that makes a free-flowing argument. There is very little that is realistic about this scenario. And few students will have ever practiced writing, without a computer, for two hours straight.
The irony of this whole process, of course, is that any well-informed writing instructor would tell you that revision is the most important part of the writing process. First drafts are rarely good, nor are they necessarily meant to be. Determining a student’s ability to think, analyze, and write well under this environment is not only unfair to the students, but it’s probably not a great way of assessing their actual, real-life critical abilities.
Takeaway #4: Creativity and Critical Thinking Appear to Be Less Valued Overall than Conformity
While on paper, I think most all educators would argue that they believe creativity and critical thinking are far more important than conformity, reading over a thousand essays in a week will quickly make you realize that American educators are teaching to the test—even in the humanities. It’s somewhat depressing to read 250 essays in a day only to realize that the vast majority of them are all written the same way—in a five paragraph essay format, typically—where students find three or four main points to address, they write them in a thesis statement at the end of their first paragraph, and they stick to the formula.
While I understand that students need to learn basic structure somewhere, it is somewhat disconcerting to me that my ten-year-old, in fourth grade, has learned the same method for writing essays. By the time a student is a junior in high school, they should be moving towards much more sophisticated (and creative) ways of approaching writing. But…the formula does work. When we read these essays, they generally cover the key points that the prompts request. The rubrics don’t provide much space for creative thinking or unusual approaches (I mean, there is some mention of unusual approaches and educators are not supposed to penalize students for this); in other words, as long as a teacher can beat the formula into students, they are much more likely to pass. When roughly 80% of essays look like this, it becomes clear that we, as a country and as educators, are valuing conformity in order to pass the test, rather than exploring creativity, voice, critical analysis, audience adaptation, and, generally, better writing and thinking.
Takeaway #5: Most American 16-Year-Olds Think the Same Way
Likely related to this value for conformity, it’s somewhat remarkable to see how the average 16-year-old American student writes and thinks. Most reference the same sources, many from pop culture, some from common literary classics. Most automatically agree with whatever passage they are given (this year, students were to analyze a speech given by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright), stating how much they love and agree with the author of the passage. Most apply the same strange rhetorical terms (you might be shocked to know that probably 75% of the rhetorical analysis essays I read either referenced the term “anaphora” or “epistrophe”) and most took note of the same sentence structures and repetitions. Very few were able to look more broadly at the historical-political landscape of the passage; at the timing, delivery, and purpose for the speech; or at the nuanced political propaganda addressed in the speech.
Most notably, roughly 80% of the essays were constructed in the same way: “Madeline Albright gave an amazing speech at a women’s college. Madeline Albright used specific rhetorical devices to convey her message to her audience. In her speech, Madeline Albright used repetition, epistrophe, and logos.” (Then three or so paragraphs would ensue covering repetition, epistrophe, and logos.)
Sure, there was some variance in terminology and occasionally in structure. And some were more thoroughly developed than others. But holistically speaking, very few were able to do anything more sophisticated with the text. They all just wrote about the same thing in the same, monotonous way. Very little personality, very little voice, very little variance in sentence structure and punctuation, very little reference to the world outside of the speech. All just sort of the same. (And, mind you, these are some of the brightest students in the country—the ones who actually register for Advanced Placement courses.)
Takeaway #6: Our Students Are Probably Much Smarter than These Tests Make Them Look
Okay, I shouldn’t say “probably.” Students really are much smarter than these exams make them look. Considering the time constraints they’re under and the conformity that they’ve been taught to address, they do remarkably well. But I believe we can teach them to be better thinkers.
When I would occasionally come across the essay that had some personality, I took pause. “Ah,” I said, “this kid knows what he/she is doing. They have a voice and they’re sharing it with me.” When the occasional student would bring in something like politics or timing or audience, I would say to myself, “yes! This kid is thinking about something bigger.”
I’m confident that students are far more capable than what they end up writing on these exams. If we could focus more on voice and personality and history and culture and politics and opinion than we do on organizational formulas and definitions of rhetorical devices, I believe students would create much better essays. They’re more than capable; they’ve just been trained to follow a formula.
Takeaway #7: Personality is Loved, Even If Not Always Valued
When reading thousands of essays, naturally there can be a feeling of monotony. We would often share with each other, while on breaks and at lunch, how everything was sounding the same. “I keep scoring 5 and 6,” we would lament. What’s interesting, though, was the excitement we expressed when we came across an essay that didn’t fall into the ordinary, formulaic essay—even if it was a horrible essay! “I just look forward to anything that’s not the typical 4, 5, or 6 essay,” we would say and collectively agree. When a student would draw a picture, write the AP reader a personalized letter, jot down the lyrics to a popular rap song, or even just complain about how stupid the test was (yes, all readers would get those types of essays, probably about one in every fifty), we rejoiced. It was something different and it was the student’s personality shining through.
As I say this, though, I don’t wish to sound like I don’t care that the student who wrote those off-the-wall comments didn’t pass the exam. I do care. I feel for the students who came into the test with high hopes, only to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of a text they ended up not feeling prepared for. I feel for the students and their parents who coughed up the money to pay for the exam. I feel for students who felt stressed and anxious or who lacked the confidence to do the test as they had been asked to do. Still, students who wrote these off-the-wall comments—or drew pictures—even though they didn’t pass the test—created moments of personality that would make us, the readers, smile.
There is an educational lesson to be learned here. It wasn’t just the poor or off-the-wall essays that sang music to our otherwise bored hearts. When personality showed up in any capacity—from unique choice of words, to random (but effective) references to students’ household pets, to tangents about politics that didn’t really work well within the essay, we love it. And when we got those occasional, brilliant students who would write an entire sophisticated essay that took on a completely new and interesting direction, we adored it. But good or bad, we readers and educators latched on to the personalities of these students. They are what kept us going. Even if the commentary or personality made for a less effective essay overall (and they received low scores because of it), we, as human beings, loved to see another human shining through.
I fear that, in a standardized format, we are removing the voice and creativity and personality of our students. There is much more brewing in their minds. And I believe strongly that their essays and their ability to think critically would improve if we allowed them to explore those personalities more.
Takeaway #8: Good Handwriting is a Thing of the Past
On a less important, but interesting note, I find it fascinating how bad handwriting is getting. I mean, my own handwriting might as well be labeled monkey scribble. I don’t blame students or their teachers. Technology has moved us into a realm where writing just isn’t done by hand very often. But boy, oh boy, if we value legibility at all, we might consider doing a few handwriting exercises more often. If for nothing else, to save the poor AP readers, like me, who have to read one every two minutes!
Takeaway #9: Grading Sucks. But Seeing Students Shine Is Amazing.
Lastly, I mention only what most high school and college teachers already feel: grading, in most capacities, sucks. The scoring of the AP English exam isn’t exactly grading (it’s “scoring,” which implies a more rubric, standardized method), but it still isn’t fun. What’s actually enjoyable about teaching is watching students learn, grow, and change. Grading is a necessary part of that, but if we can view it more from a growth in creativity and critical thinking perspective, I think we’ll all find it a little more enjoyable. If we view it as a means to get a score or a grade, it will forever suck.
My greatest takeaway of all is that students thrive a little better when faced with ambiguity. Education works best when students—and their teacher/mentors—move away from conformity and explore something new. Students become smarter, more interesting, and creative individuals when they’re not faced with exams, tests, and prescriptive rubrics.
These aren’t mind-blowing takeaways. Educators have talked about the dichotomy between formulas versus ambiguities, sciences versus arts, methods versus creativity for centuries. But every time I tell myself I need to create a rubric, every time I want to write clear instructions on an assignment or project, and every time a student does something completely different than what I expected or than what is normal, I have to step back. Is there a better way? And did my student just discover it?