7 THE RIGHT TO BE ASSESSED WELL

"One thing that happens in an assessment-heavy environment is that inordinate amounts of time are devoted to preparing for 'the test.'"

From the moment I stepped into my large, public school district in 1992, the importance of testing to the writing curriculum became readily apparent. We had a writing test that needed to be passed before graduation. As a result, the test was given each year from 10th - 12th grade. Once passed, it was no longer necessary to take the test. Not passing the test could result in one being denied graduation.

The test was basic: a. Write a business letter complete with correctly formatted headings, salutations, spacing and closings. Errors needed to be minor in the body of the letter. b. Write a formal essay related to a prompt. Again, errors needed to be minor to pass. Both essays needed passing scores for graduation requirements to be complete. Students might pass on the essay and continue to fail on the business letter mainly because of formatting errors.

A few years later, a state test was developed and for a short time, students were required to take both tests with district graduation requirements still based on the district test. Gradually, we moved to only requiring passage of the state test for graduation. Again, it could be taken a number of times. Because of the competition between districts for numbers of students passing, teachers felt coerced into spending inordinate amounts of time teaching the format versus the content of a passing essay.

Today, there is no state or district writing test. What have we learned? Vicki Spandel carefully lays out the problems of writing tests in this chapter from The 9 Rights of Every Writer.  First, there are times when test preparation for writing becomes a curriculum unto itself. Second, test prep often doesn't honor the writing process. In other words, because they want their students to pass the test, teachers often resort to formulaic teaching of writing like the use of the 5 paragraph essay, and they never go beyond what is expected on the test. And, because test prep is formulaic, students often are denied the experience of the complete writing process.

Having spent countless hours on writing teams, grading writing tests, creating writing prompts and working with a variety of rubrics and teaching writing in the classroom, I have no easy solutions. Yes, it's important for students to know how to write a coherent essay, but do they all need to be in the same format? Where does idea development and the writing process come into play?

What is your experience with evaluating writing and helping students to grow as writers? How and when should we judge proficiency?