May 22, 2000
To Whom It May Concern:
I am a high school sophomore at Mounds View High School. I, like all of my peers, recently took the statewide writing exam for 10th graders, and I just got back the grade.
I received a 3.5 out of a 6-point scale, along with 74% of the students who took the test, according to the impersonal printout that I got in the mail. It’s quite possible that I’m flattering myself, but I’ve always thought that I wrote somewhat better than “barely passing” which was the message I clearly received from the state. I’m not entirely sure what they hoped to accomplish by personally offending me and assuring me that my writing skills qualified as mediocre. Maybe they were hoping to demoralize me. It would certainly fit in with the Grad Standards as a whole.
I have to wonder in fact, what the point of a 6-point scale was. According to my printout, nobody, or less than 1% of the people testing received a 6.0 as a grade, which reminds me of the unachievable 4 on the four-point scale of the Grad Standards. Or the state’s goal could be to break the spirit of perfectionists, which I admit I am. What other possible reason could they have for assessing a point scale on a pass/fail exam? They didn’t tell me what I did wrong, or what my friends who got better scores than me did right. I can’t really improve my writing, and I sure don’t feel better about it, so that couldn’t have been their goal. Clearly, they had something else in mind.
Crushing the teenage spirit is the only thing that I can come up with. I’ve always judged myself to be a pretty smart guy, and I’d always thought standardized tests were my friends. But then of course, I’d never taken a standardized test that was so obviously subjective in it’s grading, What is ‘good’ writing? According to the instructions, the goal was to get a clear idea across, and I’m sure I did that just fine. So what was I missing, that my friends had? I went solely for clarity, as they assured me was the goal, and I frankly feel hurt and betrayed that the instructions disclosed only a portion of what they were grading on.
And even now, left with the cold comfort of the “somewhat adequate” qualification that the state has so generously allowed me, I don’t know what they were going for. I could take the test again, and I wouldn’t have any idea what they wanted that had been missing on the last test. They didn’t tell me. They didn’t or couldn’t leave it at pass/fail, but they were quite willing to hand me a number on a slip of paper that assured me that I qualified as indifferent, without any further explanation.
But then, I can’t vote, so why should they care how I feel about it?
Sincerely,
T. Odean