Thursday, March 12, 2009

Glad Tidings

So several of you have emailed me asking about how the students did on the big, bad AP World History exam about which I wrote in the last blog, especially the four young men who came and asked to have new essays for their exam.

(For those of you really on the ball, look up at the title of this blog entry…)

Let me prolong the suspense a little bit more (!) describing the grading process of these exams. I spread the grading of these exams over five days, spending about three hours a day on the exams, using the College Board’s criteria so that the exams not only looked like, sounded like, felt like, (I don’t believe there are any parallels to the sensory experiences of smell and taste here) but were also graded like the actual AP tests.

The College Board awards a single-digit number as the final grade on the test. Here is the actual terminology the College Board employs, publishes and disseminates:

5 demonstrates superiority
4 demonstrates competence
3 suggests competence
2 suggests incompetence
1 demonstrates incompetence

Ouch! I always laugh at the semantics about suggesting incompetence and competence…Good Heavens! But to keep it all in perspective, it is also regarded that a 3 (considered “passing”) is the equivalent of earning a B on a college exam…Okay…let’s keep the story moving—don’t want to lose all the readers here…

I checked the multiple choice answers first—since, well, that is the easiest always anyways. If you remember, there were 70 multiple choice questions, and this score accounts for half of the total AP score. The best score was George, who missed only 11 out of 70. Now keep in mind how hard these multiple choice questions are, so don’t go getting all holier-than-thou about George’s score. In fact—by using the College Board’s computational tables (I am sounding so actuary-like, right??) George’s multiple choice is considered so high that if he had actually skipped the essays entirely, George would have still earned a 3! That gives you a sense of his achievement.

Right behind George was Dana, another student, like George, who began the year as more of a ‘B’ student but in the last two months have catapulted themselves into the A range intelligentsia. Many of the students were in the -24-ish range, but then we did have students going below 40 missed, and, gulp, there were two students marooned on the island of -46. For a good score, their essays would have to be stupendous.

Once the busy busy work of quick-checking the multiple choice was out of the way I looked at the pile of 126 essays from this exam which must be graded. Each student had written three major essays, and on one side of the table was the pile of essays, and on the other side the severe guidelines/criteria for scoring the essays according to AP standards. I dug in and began to grade those essays, just doing one essay topic at a time hoping that consistency might rule the day.

The first possible point to win is the “acceptable thesis” point. I stress this night and day in class about the importance of crafting complex thesis statements that pose an argument, or problem, and suggest the roadmap for the entire essay. But as I began to grade the essays, I noticed a paucity of credible, gulp, acceptable, thesis statements. “There were some changes in the Indian Ocean world and some things that stayed the same” just…doesn’t…cut it, now does it?? So I began to tally when a student earned that first point. Okay—126 essays, right? Of that number only 23 actually earned that point for a strong thesis statement. My work is not yet done!

Okay, okay—let’s keep it in perspective still, people. The College Board provides lots of data, so it is easy to find that most every year the average score on an AP essay is 2 or 3 out of 9 points. That’s it! That is the average from high school students taking this exam. One of my first essays to read, Dana’s in fact, earned a 7…an impressive score, obviously next to the average! But the numbers were all over the place…then there came an essay when after re-reading it twice and staring at the standards, I realized that this was an essay for which I could award no points at all—zero points. In the two pages of writing there wasn’t a single thing that earned the student a point (okay, I know you got the point but it still is kinda dramatic). By the end of the stack of all three essays, there would be 18 essays out of the 126 that won zero points.

Finally, after five days of piecemeal work, it was time to compute the final scores. It is hard to tell how a final score might be with all the numbers lying around you. And since the College Board is nothing if not elaborate and baroque (and that is me saying it) in all their presentations, the computation is an arithmetic fantasy sequence. Okay, 120 points are possible for an AP score. Sixty of those points are for the multiple choice section and 60 points for the three essays. For the MC part, oh, yeah, there are 70 questions, so you have to shove that number into a 60 (kinda reminds me of the time Dolly Parton won a Country Music Award only to have her dress burst open and she quipped, “My daddy always said never put 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound bag!”). So you take the number they earned out of 70 (in George’s case a 59) and you multiply it by 0.8571. Then you add up the points the historian earned for the essays (9 per essay so a total of 27) and you have to stretch that number out to be 60…so you take the number of actually awarded points and multiply it by 2.22222222. Then, you take the two “raw” numbers and add them up, see what that final score is, and go to the computational tables and see which of the final numbers is the magic score. Just a little work involved!

So how did they do? One more moment of suspense…thank you…

Here are the average percentages for the AP World History from students who take the exam in the United States:

5 demonstrates superiority=10%
4 demonstrates competence=18%
3 suggests competence=29%
2 suggests incompetence=25%
1 demonstrates incompetence=18%


Keeping in mind that this is the first AP course these young scholars whose second language is English have taken, they acquitted themselves well.

The statistics for my class are as follows:

5 demonstrates superiority=21%
4 demonstrates competence=14%
3 suggests competence=41%
2 suggests incompetence=20%
1 demonstrates incompetence=5%

Not a bad showing…

How about those four young men who requested new essay topics so they could come at this exam without any advantages? How did they do? Should they have gone all honest and upright, or should they just have taken advantage of the edge they enjoyed knowing the essay topics?

Those young men earned 1 of the 4s and 3 of the 5s. These are sophomores, and according to what this means, they earned either the equivalence of an A- or an A on a college exam. And they earned these grades legitimately and authentically.

The story ends as nicely as possible. The tidings are indeed glad.

Now the more famous story of glad tidings (“of great joy which shall be to all people”) is kind of linked to this story. Last weekend I graded these exams while visiting Jerusalem. On Saturday I visited Bethlehem, and somehow the voice of Linus from the “Peanuts” 1965 Christmas special was in my head as I roamed around Manger Square pondering the discovery and celebration of those “glad tidings.”

In the next couple of days I will send you a postcard from the Jerusalem trip.

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