The English department redesigned the annual writing assessment, with the most notable change being that every student responded to the same prompt text instead of having each grade write about different works.

The teachers chose a text that students had not seen in school and the prompt was carefully crafted to be accessible for newer writers yet rich enough for more experienced analytical thinkers, English teacher Debbi Hill said.

Each paper is graded using the PHS writing rubric that was created more than 15 years ago. Scores range from 1 to 6, with six being the highest.

“From the student’s point of view, the score isn’t really meaningful if we’re having you do a different task [each year],” Hill said.

The modified assessment is also meant to give students as objective a score as possible, Hill said. Teachers will not know the student’s grade level or teacher when scoring, English teacher Rosie Reid said.

Now that they will assess students on the same assignment, it allows students to track their growth throughout high school, Hill said.

Teachers administered the test on Chromebooks using Google Forms, which allows for more objective grading, said Hill, who is also PHS’s Technology and Learning Coach. This year, the assessments will be identified only by student ID numbers, without previous years’ info on grade level and teacher.

When the teachers sat down to score the assessments last week, they started by discussed the criteria that defined each number of the scale.

“Those conversations as a department are really helpful for having more uniformity and parity in our teaching,” Reid said.

Each paper is then read and scored by two different teachers, and if the given scores do not match, a third teacher scores it.

Hill said that the writing assessment is one of the best things the English department does because, after grading, the teachers are able to discuss what they should focus on in class in order to improve students’ writing skills, such as embedding quotes and writing concisely.

“In our discussions, we see trends and then we identify the things that all of us should be focusing on in our classes more, and so eventually we see improvement,” Hill said.

In grading previous years, teachers would know which class the student papers had come from, so if Reid noticed that students in some classes had strong theses or topic sentences, she could ask the teacher how they taught that skill.

“That might be a drawback to the new method because before it really fostered conversation about how teachers were teaching individual components of the assessment,” Reid said.

Knowing that all students were assessed on the same piece of writing gives context for what their score means, Hill said. However, it is not the only measure of a student’s writing abilities.

“I always have some students who are really disappointed with their score and I know they had just a bad day,” Hill said.

Reid said that because the assessment has a time constraint that does not allow students much time to process information and write multiple drafts, it does not necessarily predict how a student will be able to perform in a more authentic writing setting.

“This gives us a snapshot of their abilities in an instant, but it’s not really how good of a writer they are,” Reid said.

Junior Alex Chang said that although the redesigned assessment allows students to see where they are in terms of other grades, not just their own, it still only tests on a single text.

“Every person identifies certain trends better than others,” Chang said.