America's Best Students Assessed

I spent last week in Kansas City grading advanced placement high school exams in European History.  Almost 110,000 of the better students across the country took this test, and a few more than 400 teachers from east to west were involved in the scoring.  I thought I'd share a few observations about what I saw and what it suggests about the state of education today

All of these students were enrolled in an AP class at their high school to prepare them for what was likely to be on the test.  And we scorers, 60% of whom teach at the high school level and 40% in college, were trained and then monitored to keep our scoring consistent and on standard. 

I can't go into specifics about the questions themselves, having signed a confidentiality agreement with Educational Testing Service, but there were positives and negatives about the students' performances on the essays I saw. 

Here are some of the strengths.  Basic grammar and spelling were good, indeed better than I expected.  The great majority were able to express themselves clearly and directly.  Reading comprehension was a strength, too: although some faltered, most by far were able to correctly interpret the meanings of a selection of short historical documents.  Students were generally able to place similar perspectives together into coherent groups.  Most could form a fairly reasonable explanatory thesis.

There were general areas of mediocrity.  Placing events in correct chronological order was one of these.  Some had this nailed, but many were completely at sea on it.  While some had their facts straight, others were hit and miss with them.  Though some excelled at analyzing ideas like cause and effect, quite a few were so-so at best.  Additionally, though some were quite thorough many were fairly lazy, doing only as much as was required to meet a standard.  For instance, they had to correctly characterize at least seven of twelve documents.  Not a few only attempted seven, and if they got any of these wrong they failed to earn that point.

Then there were the true weaknesses.  Penmanship seems to be a dying art.  Only a few could product legible cursive writing.  Most of the easiest to read were printed.  Another, perhaps more important, weakness was a widespread inability to discern a statement's likely reliability or the likely source of bias in a point of view.  These critical thinking skills are crucial to the proper functioning of a democratic society, and sadly, based on what I saw, most of our best and brightest high school students have little facility with them.

Overall I felt more positive about what I had seen than I expected (perhaps my expectations were pretty low?), but there are areas of real concern for our society as well.