Hannah Emmanuele
The people who score our children’s essays on standardized tests every year apparently work in sweat shops, staffed with waitresses, laid off factory workers and life slackers, and are driven by deceptive/unethical rubric and scoring practices. From the Twin Cities’ hub of essay scoring, Minneapolis CityPages reports Inside the Million Dollar Essay Scoring Business:
“DiMaggio soon learned that his boss was a temp like him. In fact, the boss was only the team leader because he’d once managed a Target store.
DiMaggio found out that the human resources woman who’d hired them both was a temp. He realized that their office space—filled with long tables lined with several hundred computer monitors and generic office chairs—was rented.
Eventually, DiMaggio got used to not asking questions. He got used to skimming the essays as fast as possible, glancing over the responses for about two minutes apiece before clicking a score.”
“We can’t give this many 1s and 2s,” she told him firmly. The scorers would not be going back to re-grade the hundreds of tests they’d already finished—there just wasn’t time. Instead, they were just going to give out more 3s.
“The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted,” he says. “It’s a farce.”
“They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers,” he says. “They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me.”
Is this the accurate assessment of student learning we were promised? The full article is worth a read.
