Grade Level Assessments, Writing Under Pressure

By Spencer Chee

The clock is ticking and the essay is not writing itself. Brainstorming helped but the pressure is on to finish. Everybody else has their head down staring at their paper, but the writer’s block sets in and the great essay that was going to be written seems distant. This is the writing assessment at PHS that students must take until they are seniors. This assessment, unique to PHS, has been administered for 11 years.

The grade level assessments test the writing skills of students in all grades. Students are required to read a selected piece of literature and address a prompt about it. This way, students can make references to the text and can demonstrate their writing ability. English teacher Beth Black said that this assessment is exclusive to our school because of the incorporation into the
teachers' curriculum.

“The English teachers developed it because we wanted to have an assessment that was the same across the board for every class and something that came out of our curriculum, as opposed to the STAR test, which comes out of the state,” Black said.

The scores on the assessment can contribute to a student’s acceptance into either honors English for juniors or AP English for seniors. Some students take this assessment very seriously in the hopes of getting into an advanced English class, but others like junior Joe Chellew just want to see their personal growth.

“I want to do well on this one mostly to see if I’ve improved,” Chellew said. “I’ll decide on AP later.”

Although some prefer an in-class timed write over the classic at-home essay, junior Andy Slabaugh said he enjoys the freedom of an at-home essay because the facts are at his fingertips.

A timed write is one thing that all high school students experience and have to master if they hope to be successful in college. Some students, like junior Greg Afong, do not feel that this assessment is an accurate representation of student writing skills, however.

“It's good experience because it’s a timed write, but really I don’t think people should solely use the assessment to judge how well a student can write because it’s just one essay,” Afong said.

Black feels differently about the assessment from a teacher’s point of view and said that it can be a very accurate measure of student’s writing.

“In general, it’s pretty accurate and gives us a good picture of how our students are doing and how we are doing as teachers,” Black said.

Senior Alex Stuetz, who did well on the assessment last year, chose not to take AP English because he felt that more energy should be put towards what he will be studying in college.