POINTSCORE!

Unfortunately, today turned out to be the most boring day of my life.

I spent the day scoring the open response section of the New York State Language Arts exam at the Crowne Plaza Laguardia Airport. Initially, I thought the day might be a nice break from Monday teaching, but one thing I love about my job is that the days fly by despite being just short of 12 hours.

Even with planes whizzing overhead, today did not fly anywhere.

The first two hours of the trying experience were spent training, calibrating and norming so that we could grade the responses fairly and objectively. Keep in mind, I support state testing. Tests keeps charters accountable, give charters funding and give teachers a good read on how their students are progressing. However, today tested my belief in the test. Even after hours of training, total objectivity seemed like a tough target to hit.

Over shiny hotel pastries and lukewarm coffee, the assembled teachers learned how to grade the open responses on a somewhat-random 0,1,2 scale. The trainers were a group of 60+ women from Long Island dressed mostly in bright red suits or twin sets (not sure if they planned it). They all had long careers in education. I suspect this gig makes you some easy post-retirement cash come May. In stark contrast, the trainees were all charter school teachers, which means they were all young, bright and somewhat feisty. As the women tried to teach us which textual details counted and which did not, the charter crew started to get predictably heated—borderline antagonistic.

“So you’re telling me this response would earn a one simply because the scholar (yes, we sometimes call them scholars) wrote 3 million instead of 3 thousand? That’s absurd!”

“And this one! You give this a two when the student clearly has no grasp of subject/verb agreement? That’s unjust! That’s perpetuating the problem! The cycles of poverty!”

I’m exaggerating only a very little bit.

I thought there might be an all-out brawl, so I did what I always do in these situations: sit back, put a vaguely disinterested look on my face and let the drama play out. There’s no point inserting myself; it’ll only prolong what is definitely a pointless conversation.

The statewide rubrics are imperfect but set in stone, and a wide-eyed charter school teacher from East Harlem isn’t going to be able to change what counts and what doesn’t. Who fails and who passes. I care about consistency and norms as much as the next guy, but I also care about not being at Laguardia airport for longer than I have to be if I’m not waiting to fly somewhere warm.

Once we’d been sufficiently trained, we moved on to phase two. Thousands and thousands (maybe gajillions) of open responses had been scanned into POINTSCORE, the latest in test-scoring software. Yeah, betcha didn’t know that exists. We were each set up with a laptop and a login number. We were forbidden cell phones, coffee, or Gmail—the trifecta that sustains me. We plopped down and began to grade. The responses flashed up on the screen, one illegible set of handwriting after another. As soon as you graded one, another would appear. My eyes started to glaze and my foot tapped uncontrollably as I clicked. And clicked. And clicked. I had no idea what time it was. My mouth was dry. I looked around to make sure I wasn’t surrounded by mutant teacher-bots. They looked mostly fleshy.

Every so often the head grader would bark out your ID number and you would step back to her computer where she would cajole you into changing a grade (usually for the better). So much for objectivity.

The passage I was grading was a poem about a wonderful teacher named Mr. B who affected thousands of students before his teary retirement. I’m not joking—it was straight-up teacher propaganda. One response I graded was literally—and only—a stanza copied directly from the poem. It earned full-credit because the specific stanza so painstakingly copied did, in fact, answer the open response question perfectly. Interesting. And another, beautifully-written character analysis based on several inferences, received a zero because the conclusions gleaned were too inferential. Kinda messed up, right? Rewarding plagiarism while penalizing independent thinking?

The day finally ended. My head was throbbing and my stomach was growling because the vegetarian option at the provided lunch was soup made with chicken broth. In the car back to South Brooklyn, I tried to think of a few good takeaways to soothe my overall frustration. The day gave me perspective, at least. It showed me how the other charter kids are doing and gave me a useful baseline. It also gave me perspective about the test in general. We can spend months prepping and stressing over performance and results, but in the end there’s a lot of room for human error, subjectivity and mis-clicks on the computer that even POINTSCORE can’t detect. I’m not sure there’s a better way to get the job done, though. So at the end of the day, it is what it is. At least now I’ve seen the test from every unpleasant angle, making the whole process a bit more transparent. I suppose I should start encouraging plagiarism…