The Plight of the English Teacher

AMONG the reasons advanced for the inability of students to write, one of the most frequently cited has been the gradual decline in the use of essay tests and their replacement by objective tests, both in large-scale programs like the College Board examinations and in individual classrooms.

The two main arguments against objective testing go like this: First, a student may pass an objective test even though he can barely write his own name, because objective tests do not in fact test writing ability. They do not measure the ability to draw together material from one’s own experience, organize it, and create a balanced piece of writing. The only way to evaluate a person’s ability to write is to read what he has written. Second, objective tests have a negative effect on the curriculum, since the absence of the specter of essay examinations is resulting in English teachers’ giving up the effort of teaching writing. And students, ever pragmatic, will no longer put in time mastering a skill they are not required to use. Conversely, if essay tests predominated, students would be motivated to write more, teachers would teach more writing, and better writing would result. Finally, of course, the best writers would invariably be correctly identified.

The College Board first administered a series of objective tests to scholarship candidates in April, 1937, and reported the results in May. This experiment, with its several practical advantages, was successful from the beginning. As the original group of scholarship students progressed through college, it became evident that prediction of college achievement based on objective tests was as accurate as that based on essay examinations, and, more important, the tests, with their wide coverage and freedom from a prescribed syllabus, were much fairer to public school students and those from different parts of the country.

During World War II, when colleges instituted summer sessions and the essay examinations could not be read in time to admit students, the scholarship tests became the admissions tests, administered several times a year. After the war there seemed little justification for resuming the cumbersome, expensive, and less revealing essay examinations, especially in view of the great increase in the number of students.

Since the war there has been an unstinting effort to find some essay material that would prove as valuable as the objective tests, especially in measuring writing ability. One study of considerable significance involving several years of experimentation was based on the premise that the single most accurate and comprehensive available evaluation of a student’s ability to write would be that made by his English teacher, who has read everything he has written over a period of a year or more. Therefore, English teachers in six good private schools were asked to rate their students on factors like mechanics, style, organization, reasoning, and content.

To determine what kind of test gave the most similar appraisal of the students, the ratings were compared with their scores on three measures: the College Board General Composition Test, an objective test of writing ability, and an objective verbal aptitude test. Both in overall ratings and on specific qualities there was a low degree of correlation between the teachers’ ratings and the individuals’ scores on the composition test, but a considerably higher correlation of the teachers’ ratings and the scores on both the objective test of writing ability and the verbal aptitude test. The objective tests, that is, agreed more closely with the teachers in identifying good and poor writers than the essay test did. When the students took all three tests a second time, their scores on the objective tests remained almost the same, while their scores on the essay test differed rather widely from those received the first time. Thus, the objective tests were both more accurate and more consistent in identifying the students’ abilities.

Why is it that essay tests, which on the surface are so attractive, turn in such a disappointing performance when their results are checked systematically against the experience of teachers?

Students writing on the same question are not running the same race. One finds the question to his liking, gets off to a good start, and completes his answer in fine style, while a second student whose writing is equally good may make half a dozen false starts before he realizes that the time is almost up, whereupon he muddles his way through in a panic. One student may handle the question in a simple, cautious, but correct manner, while another tackles it more ambitiously but less accurately. One will glide fluently away from the issue at hand, concealing a lack of information under a genuinely skillful pen, while another will set down a mass of relevant detail in awkward and stilted fashion.

Such problems would be unimportant if an adequate sample of each student’s writing could be obtained. But only a few topics can be covered by the six or eight questions possible in even a three-hour essay examination, and numerous studies have demonstrated that they do not give adequate evidence of the real ability of the student.

However, if the essay examinations are somewhat unreliably written, they are even less reliably read. The basic problem is that teachers do not even agree with themselves when they read papers, much less with other readers. In one study, for example, an eighth-grade composition was graded twice by 28 teachers. Fifteen who gave it passing marks the first time failed it on the second round, while 11 who failed it the first time passed it the second. As for different readers’ opinions of the same paper, they have on occasion provided grades ranging from 50 to 98 on the same paper, as read by 142 teachers.

Such discrepancies might justifiably be attributed to poor reading in the case of inexperienced readers and to a lack of uniform criteria to be used in judging papers consistently. Even under controlled conditions, however, the situation is not much better. The problem of estimating writing ability in, for example, the College Board examinations is tremendously difficult, with 150odd readers grading more than 75 thousand papers and with only a small sample of each student’s writing available. To keep 150 readers grading according to a common standard is essential but well-nigh impossible. In spite of the fact that they are a highly selected group of teachers — expert readers brought together under one roof and given a day’s training and practice in grading sample papers before they start on the examinations, and then supervised closely by veteran “ table leaders” whose sole function is to iron out problems of consistency in grading — they still do not agree enough to permit one to view the resulting grades with confidence.

UNQUESTIONABLY, the ability to write is one of the essential goals of education, and the major cause of poor writing is insufficient practice. I am convinced, nonetheless, that the lack of practice stems not from the nature of the examinations currently in use but from the extreme shortage of teachers and the ever-increasing number of students. If we could even remotely approach the ratio of one teacher per hundred pupils, as Dr. Conant has urged, schools could require enough writing to provide the practice essential to improvement, and teachers would have time to read the papers carefully and make constructive comments. But under present teaching loads assignments of written work are dwindling, and in the future they may be cut even further.

The average English teacher meets 175 students daily in five classes. If he should assign one paper a week to each class, he would then spend four hours a night seven nights a week and most of Saturday and Sunday afternoons just correcting papers. No letup is in sight, moreover, since tomorrow’s high school students are already, as one writer has put it, “bulging out the walls of some elementary schools,” and there will be four million more students, 50 per cent more, in high school in 1965 than there were in 1959. Any stopgap measures to counteract current overcrowding would be both exorbitant and, by the time they could be effected, obsolete. In Chicago, for example, it would cost the school system about $2 million annually to reduce the teacher-pupil ratio to one to a hundred, even now. By the time it was done, the larger classes would be entering.

It is conditions like these which severely handicap teachers in teaching writing. Students need frequent practice in various types of writing, under close supervision, with constructive comments on specific points. The lack of time for correcting papers is the chief drawback for the teacher, and it results in the lack of individual attention which is the chief drawback for the students.

There is, however, a way to relieve this problem, through the use of an extremely valuable and largely untapped resource — namely, collegeeducated housewives, to function as lay readers. The systematic use of lay readers would enable women who are well educated and who have good English training to work under the teachers’ supervision and provide the close attention to individual writing problems that is so badly needed. Teachers would be rescued from the avalanche of papers and would be able to assign considerably more written work.

An experiment using lay readers has been carried out during the last two years by Paul Diederich of the Educational Testing Service under a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education. The study has included sixteen cities this year, where readers were selected from among the women college graduates, many of them with former teaching or secretarial experience, and given tests of verbal aptitude and of ability to correct and grade papers. The final candidates were all interviewed to obtain readers who would work well with the individual teachers. Each reader was assigned to assist one teacher, usually in two classes. The readers then practiced reading several sample papers, grading and annotating them, discussing each step with the teachers, and comparing their own reactions with copies previously graded by other teachers, before starting to handle the work of the classes.

The many advantages of using lay readers have been apparent to all concerned. Teachers have felt relieved by the knowledge that a competent, careful reader was making appropriate notes and constructive comments on each paper, and they have been encouraged to undertake more writing instruction in their classes. In Detroit, one school assigned twenty papers per semester and one nineteen, which meant at least one paper a week. In general, the readers have worked harmoniously and enthusiastically with the teachers, taking a strong personal interest in the progress of the students. They have frequently attended classes when the papers were returned and have been readily available for conferences with the students.

Much has been written about the plight of the educated housewife who feels trapped by the lack of intellectual stimulation and inability to serve the community constructively. Acting as a lay reader combines the convenience of working at home, usually while one’s own children are in school, with needed service in the educational world. It provides the kind of link between the schools and the community that is highly desirable. Yet the cost to schools is only about $500 yearly per reader, on the basis of 25 cents per short paper, 10 cents for checking rewritten work, and $1.50 per hour for student conferences and correcting long papers.

In addition to improving writing by providing more practice, it may be possible to develop somewhat more effective methods of teaching English. Recently the College Board has established a Commission on English to make a study of the nature of the curriculum and various means of increasing its effectiveness. In this way it should be possible to make available to all English teachers the best thinking on curriculum content and teaching methods, so that they can make the most of each hour of teaching.

Communication is one of the most prized and expensive areas of American enterprise today, particularly in the commercial world. We are an amazingly, sometimes exhaustingly verbal nation, constantly exhorted through journalism, advertising, and the media of entertainment and edification to talk out our problems, whether they are personal, interpersonal, national, or international. Yet the art of written communication, which is clear thinking clearly expressed, appears to be disappearing rapidly. To educate our student population so that each individual can learn to express his ideas, no matter how limited or abstruse they may be, is hardly too lofty a goal. To accomplish it requires a tremendous concerted effort toward providing our students with opportunities to write frequently, under competent supervision, and within the framework of a creative curriculum.