A Cog in the Wheel

I've been duped. Don't you hate it when you are led to believe one thing and then the big switcheroo happens. I'm doing a temp job, scoring for a national, well respected company. I read extended responses to questions on an assessment test. So, they read a passage about waterfalls, and then a prompt asks the students to "describe how the water falls over the rocks. What in the passage tells you this?" This is not my question, but this is the kind of stuff we're reading.

My question has a possible 4 points. That means I have to find four things correct with the response that they answered correctly. And two of the responses have to have details. But if the first part isn't there, they can't get credit for the detail. Got it? Me neither. It's a lot of thinking. And it's not exact. Because kids are different (boy don't we know that!) and each one will answer oh so slightly differently from the anchor set (these are responses that have been selected to best represent what you are looking for in each score range). There is a lot of wiggle room. It's called holistic scoring.

Basically, holistic means you can make a judgement call, but only if it completely matches the scoring guidelines, but not really. Confused yet. Yes, this is not an easy task. It seems like the rules are always changing.

"Well, that response gets a 3, but this one only gets a two because we don't like that word as well as we like this one."

I'm told it works. I can't understand how you can have 75 different people, from different backgrounds, opinions, biases, etc, score something the same, even with a detailed outline of what is acceptable. Because it just doesn't work like that. You have to make a judgement call most of the time. The kids don't use the words they're supposed to. Does surprised mean excited, nervous, amused? Can you take good to mean kindly, likes, accepts? It's crazy.

So the duped part. Last year, when I did this job, I was paid by the hour, with bonuses for extra good work (meaning fast work). I did fairly well. Got a bonus of varying amounts every week. Yesterday, the supervisor on the job drops a bomb. We're getting paid by the piece. That means, every response I grade, I get 13 cents. Yes, I said 13 cents. So speed is obviously the key. But is that accurate? And how much do I have to read to make what I was making last year?

Well, kids, here's some math for you: In order to make $12.50 an hour, I have to read and score 96 responses in an hour. That's about 1 and half responses per minute. I don't remember how I did last year, how many responses I scored, but it was also a much easier question, so you could do it quickly. Read 100 responses in an hour, make $13.00. Doesn't seem worth it.

That's a lot of brain power used at night, when I'm sleepy and cranky and ready to relax. Not very relaxing, I'll tell you.

Could all be for nothing. Maybe I'll score 200 an hour and make $26 dollars. Maybe pigs will fly out of my butt. Maybe I'll win the lottery. Who knows. It could happen.