Did anyone ever hear of this?

BillyMc
Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:35:06 +0000

Interesting… I still wouldn’t want it used as a measure. For example… if D’s CR PSAT score goes up this year, will it be because of her English teacher? Or maybe because of the extracurricular Latin class she is taking that is expanding her vocabulary (a class that the English teacher has nothing to do with)? Or… maybe because of the additional classics and poetry reading she has undertaken on her own to improve her Quiz Bowl knowledge?

And if it goes down, is it because the teacher was ineffective? Or because she had a horrible head cold the day she took the test?

These are all good points. At my high school, the model was generally that if a student showed more than a year’s worth of improvement on the FCAT (that dreaded Florida standardized test) the student would receive a 100 exam grade in his/her English class for that semester. It was more of an incentive for the student, not the teacher. And let me tell you, that 100 was a grade saver (when a 99 just wouldn’t do, literally).

However, it wasn’t a good method. Woo, I can answer a CR-esque test well… does that mean I know all about the literature we’ve been going over in class? Does that make me a good academic writer? I was glad for the 100, but, speaking from a detached standpoint, making the students take the real exam (and not the screwed up standardized test) would be better.



Or maybe because of the extracurricular Latin class she is taking that is expanding her vocabulary

Smart move. Us Latin students score an average of 666 (NERO CAESAR) on CR, as opposed to the national average of 501. 60% of English vocabulary is derived from Latin, after all.

Lingua mortua sola lingua bona est.