they are creative in away that no one would imagen

February 6, 2012 10:28 PM

'In life, “no two people regard the world in exactly the same way,” as J. W. von Goethe says. Everyone sees and reacts to things in different ways. Even though they may see the world in similar ways, no two people’s views will ever be exactly the same. This statement is true since everyone sees things through different viewpoints.'
posted by crayz (8 comments total)

In college I made up a syllogism to prove exactly this pointy, but it was for an argument about identity equaling individual misperceptions.

It was not well received.

Strangely, my paper outlining the odds of Pascal's Wager, showing that he in fact took the wrong bet, was very well-received. C'est la vie.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:18 PM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Hey! I saw this earlier tonight too and was totally gonna post it here. But then I thought it might get deleted as too thin of a post. I guess we'll see!

Now, not everyone has to be a perfect speller and flawless grammarian to succeed in the world. But everyone needs to keep in mind the purpose of language: to communicate. Some of those sentences were just plain hard to understand.

I guess we have the answer to G.W. Bush's infamous question: our children is most certainly NOT learning. Not learning rudimentary writing skills anyway.
posted by MattMangels at 11:21 PM on February 6

No. We probably should have made the pie higher.
posted by Adventurer at 1:41 AM on February 7

I dunno, the piece tries hard to imply all of these horrible writing samples are somehow being deemed "good enough" under the system. The truth is all but one of the scoring samples they list are examples of scoring 50% - failing by a good margin. So, yeah, they're bad, and they're supposed to be, being examples of what failing-but-not-0 looks like.

A short response is scored 0 to 2 points. A student who gets 1’s on both responses has a pretty good shot at scoring 65 and passing the exam.

A "pretty good shot"? What misleading crap. They're failing the test and I'm sure statistical analysis would reveal that scoring 50% on one part of the test more strongly correlates with failing the whole thing than "scoring 65 and passing the exam". Their "pretty good shot" revolves around, well, doing a lot better on the rest of the test.

Anyway there's no shortage of weak sauce in these test-driven education initiatives, but I don't think this article is barking up the right trees.
posted by Bokononist at 2:02 AM on February 7 [2 favorites]

rawr New York Times filter. "How do you create a single graduation exam for 200,000 seniors when some are heading to the Ivy League and others to pump gas? " Keep on representin' the 1%, NYT.
posted by Yowser at 3:33 AM on February 7

Why does this sound like an essay written for a freshman English class?
posted by spitbull at 4:36 AM on February 7

I worked in a job where I scored the NY Regent's English Exam. The sample paper is not representative of the general quality of the exam responses. Yes, there are low scoring papers, and this is one of them. Few papers are this poor, and it is deceitful for the NYTimes to show this paper as representative of the quality of work students are doing.

We are constantly admonished to consider that these papers are written under pressure with no advance preparation. The students must write on a subject they don't see until the exam starts, and then have to sit down and write an essay instantly. The content of the essays are scored separately from grammar, spelling, and "conventions" of writing. I have seen students who were almost completely unable to write a coherent sentence score very highly on content and ideas, and fluent writers score almost nothing on content and ideas. There is usually little connection between written fluency and ideas, which is why they are separate scores.

Now you must excuse me for the rest of the day, I have to go score some math tests.
posted by charlie don't surf at 5:04 AM on February 7 [3 favorites]

That example essay would have gotten a 5 if the student had managed to work in something like "Von Goethe correctly believed that everyone has a different Weltanschauung, or view of the world." Sigh.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:22 AM on February 7