Grading the N.Y.S. Regents Exams: The Past, the Present and the Future?

Whither Regents grading?  I started grading N.Y.S. Regents exams twenty years ago.  The system has been turned on its head by persons who manufacture a system founded on fundamentally flawed principles.  They start with the premise teachers are responsible for the standardized test grades of their students.  They then view teachers as cheating scoundrels, not to be trusted, while putting ultimate faith in their own brains to tinker with and micromanage a system of great complexity.     

In halcyon days, teachers had nothing personal to gain or lose from the scores of their students.  It was a time when bagels mixed with reaffirmations of collegial bonds as well as the underlying purposes of education.  Teachers united in their commitment to the task at hand and to serve the academic needs of the community.  Teachers would discuss appropriate scores for given answers, grading in a common room.  Often, a teacher might read a response, share it with the group and ask advice on how others would interpret the answer. 

In one particular instance from days of yore, a teacher read my student's paper.  She was startled to find the student writing a thematic essay in part about the song "Fables of Faubus" by Charles Mingus.  She asked me whether or not the student was fabricating his answer.  I assured her that the student was a jazz  musician and he had completed a presentation to the class on the topic. 

Teachers did not purposefully grade the papers of their own students.  Twenty years ago, when students were not scheduled by class to take the exams, you might run across a stray paper of one of your students here or there in the piles.  Teachers did not benefit personally in any way then from the scores of their students.  Now, students are assigned testing rooms by class section.  Following this change, teachers were told not to grade their own class sets...and didn't.

In the old days, if students failed by two or three points, teachers might pull a paper and look at it again.  I suppose this is why some persons are fast to accuse teachers of cheating.  Let me explain.  There was no financial benefit to anyone in doing so.  Conversely, if students failed, teachers would not be threatened by ineffective ratings.  Teachers merely had a concern that grading rubrics were subjective and if a student might be sentenced to the equivalent of an academic execution via the exam, then all doubt of innocence should be removed.  Many times, teachers could not find any extra points to give students.  I cannot tell you the number of times I looked at a paper and could not find the points.  But there were times, I could easily find the points and it felt nice to issue a reprieve.    

Two teachers score every essay to help ensure that it is graded correctly; but this, apparently, is not good enough.  For two years, teachers have been sent to alternate grading locations because they are no longer trusted to house their own papers and grade them.  Last June, I went to an alternate grading site.  I saw the mess of the McGraw-Hill Great Grading Debacle first hand.  Not only did teachers outpace the scanners, leading to wasted manpower hours, but there were numerous glitches.  In some cases, parts of answers were covered and essays might have been electronically missed by the scorer if written on the incorrect page of the test booklet.  Happily, schools  could later review papers in a more cumbersome process for correcting errors.  In the old days, we could just walk down the hallway, find the student's paper, locked away in a secure location, and assure that he or she had received the grade truly deserved.  Teachers derived no benefit from verifying that justice had been done except for a better night's sleep.  When the papers were scanned last June, whole sets were lost.  On top of this, due to scanning delays, many papers remained ungraded on graduation day.  Teachers then had to be paid overtime to complete the grading.  Happily, the City decided to nix the contract for test scanning.

This January some teachers were sent to alternate locations to grade.  Some had to wait for the papers to show up.  In some cases, there was a glut of foreign language papers, but too few translators and not enough English-language papers for the graders present.  This rarely happens when schools grade their own papers.  There are members of the school community present who speak the languages of the student body.  Again all the top-down management made for less than ideal situations.  Many of the social aspects of grading were either discouraged or absent.  In the past, conversation was integral to the grading process.  Teachers sporadically shared points of view on the rubric as it related to student answers.  In days of old, teachers might choose to stay late and help out in myriad ways.  Given I lived in the neighborhood and then had no children of my own, I often did.  Everyone was working towards a common goal.  Now, given the new system and all the attitudes embedded within it, one cannot get home fast enough.  One feels prodded like cattle, branded with the mark of cheater and ready for the stampede home.