Too Few Students Were Receiving Developmental Instruction Through Intro Writing

By Author: Mark Gary
Total Articles: 61
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The writing faculty also asserted that too few students already were receiving developmental instruction through Intro Writing. But when GSU administrators asked for evidence of misplacements, the writing faculty could provide none, other than declining grade point averages in College Writing. No one had studied the issue at GSU.

GSU's decision-making structure in regard to placement privileges AAC administrators positioned within student services over writing experts located within the faculty, on the academic side of campus. At GSU and elsewhere, faculty who are experts in their fields are not called upon by campus decision Replica Cartier Santos makers to make policies at their own institutions though they might well be called in, ironically enough, to advise on the very same policy decisions at other institutions. Thus, at many institutions, and at GSU in particular, writing faculty have persuasive powers only. Without strong data, and in the midst of a national climate to decrease, not increase, remediation on the college level, ...
... writing faculty at GSU were not effective in making the case against adopting the SAT-W as a placement instrument. In part because the writing faculties were unable to provide evidence that the placement process had not worked well in the past, and in part because of a reliability mindset, AAC made the decision to maintain its historic placement rates keep the numbers the same by using the new SAT scores.

In both 2005 and 2006, about 87 percent of incoming students had been placed into College Writing, and 13 percent into Intro Writing. Using the 13 percent placement rate as a baseline, AAC researchers reviewed the impact of various combinations of test score cutoffs, including those suggested by the writing faculty. Based on incoming GSU students in 2006, if 8 were the minimum score for automatic placement into College Writing, fully 38.5 percent of GSU students would place into Intro Writing; if 7 were the minimum score for College Writing, 17.8 percent of students would place into Intro Writing. But a cut score of 6 would place only 3.5 percent of students Cartier Replica Watches into Intro Writing. There was no way to get to the historic 13 percent using the SAT-W essay score because the scores were grouped too tightly together: 75 percent of all students received scores of 6, 7, or 8.

The writing faculty knew that the 13 percent solution was the wrong approach using a questionable tool in a questionable way to achieve a predetermined result. However, the writing faculty had not positioned themselves to challenge the historic 13 percent placement rates because they had never carefully examined the old placement process or its results. They had not tried to systematically identify or track allegedly misplaced students. Although instructors had been authorized to seek individual student replacements, few had ever done so for reasons both pedagogical and practical. The writing faculties were concerned about mistakes in placement, but they neither took steps to correct placement nor collected data to make a case for a new procedure.

After demonstrating the problems inherent in using the writing faculty's preferred version of the SAT the SAT-W essay score AAC found another method to get to 13 percent. Finding the total SAT-W section score more psychometrically reliable than the SAT-W essay alone, AAC researchers argued that "using the essay [alone] may hamper test reliability and subsequently produce undesirable placement errors. In test development theory, reliability increases as test items increase; SAT developers introduced the multiple choice section to enhance the reliability of the writing test by assessing the writing score as a composite score of an essay and a multiple choice section" (Academic Assessment Center 1). From the following sentence comes an interesting leap common to those who value reliability over validity: "This design will also provide a better rank order of the examinees with their comparative 'true' abilities" (Academic Assessment Center 2). In essence, reliability was chosen over validity, a preference that has been well documented and objected to by such writing assessment historians as Norbert Elliot, Brian Huot, Pamela Moss, and Kathleen Yancey. This privileging of reliability severely limits assessment. As Moss explains, quite logically, "There are certain intellectual activities that standardized assessment can neither document nor promote". Thus, the "true abilities" that AAC researchers believe they have successfully ranked through a composite SAT-W assessment are perhaps better described as limited, particular abilities, and not closely or especially related to the abilities required for writing in college.