Journal 14-2

English 11
Students brought their Critical Lens essays to class today and had them scored by peers. Before scoring, though, I listed the required elements on the board. Failure to include ALL required elements lowered a student's score from whatever it should have been to a 1. I had several students in all classes who automatically scored a 1 because they failed to follow directions and didn't include all the required elements. After scoring essays, I allowed students to either submit their essay and hope I agreed with their peer's assessment, or keep the essay and improve it for a higher score. Most students kept their essays, but a few chose to take their chances. I haven't checked their essays yet, though.

The main purpose of this entry today was prompted by a question asked during 2nd period. The student. MR, asked how I thought the class would do on the test. I answered that I didn't know because each class is different. Then she asked if I though anyone would get a six. My gut tells me no, I don't think any student in this particular class will score a six, but what I said was, "It's possible for some students to score a six, but it really depends on the day and the prompt. If it's a bad day, or if the prompt is difficult, that can bring scores down." Then I got to thinking, so I dug up last year's essay scores and charted them out. Here's what I found:

There are four essays on the exam. Each essay is scored by 2, sometimes 3 graders. The grades are then averaged to find a student's score on the essay. So far, I've only tracked the scores as a single unit - I haven't sorted the scores by essay type. The first number is the number of true juniors who earned that particular score. The second number is the number of accelerated sophomores who earned a particular score.

Score 1: 1
Score 1.5: 0
Score 2: 4
Score 2.5: 5
Score 3: 22
Score 3.5: 45 + 1
Score 4: 79+13
Score 4.5: 59+25
Score 5: 30+26
Score 5.5: 28+40
Score 6: 6+15

What I plan to do is sort the rest of the data by essay type, and then compare last year's juniors to this year's juniors.

I KNOW that you're not supposed to to that - it presents skewed data. However, for the purposes of this project, I'm doing it. I'm teaching better this year than I did last year, so I should have higher scores...right?