The Alphabet Soup of Scores

By Mary Lee Wile

I grew up believing numbers were true. "Math is beautiful," my uncle would say. "With all the uncertainties of life, math provides a place where there is such a thing as one right answer." I didn't grow up to be a math teacher like my uncle--I teach English--but I understood what he meant. Recent months, however, have shaken my childhood understanding of numbers-as-truth as I have learned about changes in scoring for both the Maine Educational Assessment, my state's achievement barometer, and the national college-entrance standard, the Scholastic Assessment Test.

In March, my 11th graders took the Maine Educational Assessment, or M.E.A. A few weeks later, I joined the Maine language-arts consultant Nancy Andrews and several other colleagues to begin selecting "anchor papers" for the essay-reading sessions of the test-scoring scheduled in April. These anchor papers represent the designated categories on the scoring guide, ranging from 1 (weak) to 6 (stellar). Our task was to identify approximately a dozen representative essays in each category in order to provide a range of samples for those who would do the actual reading and scoring.

During a mid-morning break, one of the other readers commented that his school's M.E.A. writing scores had gone down last year and yet he felt confident that the school's writing program was as strong as ever. He was puzzled. Nancy Andrews said that this decline was to be expected. Schools with low scores were improving and students throughout the state were writing better. She repeated several times that she'd had a difficult time finding "low" essays to include in the day's collection of samples. Papers that now earn a 1 or 2 used to earn scores of 3 or 4; that means that a paper which once would have scored in the top half, at 4, now might earn a next-to-the-bottom score of 2. So if a school's students continue to produce work equivalent to past years', their...