Reflections on AP Reading

So I'm beginning the long trip home. Had a great conversation with Keith on the bus ride to the airport, about physical chemistry and the lab curriculum. It's 8:55 and I'm waiting for my 11:45 flight.

This whole AP grading experience has been quite illuminating. The experience itself, it seems to me, is an exercise in team building. We are divided up into different questions to grade and then, with the posting of daily progress reports by question, we are placed into a faux competition with each other. So naturally each of us grading Q6 are encouraged to work together to get finished. Even after hours we "stick together" to a degree: while playing cards last night one of my fellow Q6 graders asked for a group picture of her fellow Q6 grader compatriots. This strikes me as a bit odd- it's an AP question, folks-but I suppose this type of team-building is, at the least, benign, and may even be beneficial insofar as we are all members of the chemical education community.

On the other hand, it reminds me of those "team building" exenises that we have all participated in at some point: everybody goes out to the woods and then climb ropes, or build a teepee, or some other exercise that requires teamwork. I have never liked these exercises because the final product at the end is inevitably discarded. What is the point of climbing a bunch of ropes if there is nothing at the top worth climbing to? With AP grading, however, there is a very definite and important final product thar we are helping to create: student AP scores.

So you might be wondering, Jeff, what's the problem here? ETS builds team spirit among chemical educators while at the same time producing an important final product. The problem is, I seriously doubt this is what students are actively wanting to support when they pay their $85. Do students say, "yeah I will pay $85 so my AP teacher can network and be a part of a team"? No, they pay money because they want their chemical knowledge accurately assessed (except for the weaker students, who don't mind if the assessment isn't so accurate).

And the real problem is that these two objectives are, to a limited degree, exclusive. The team-building experience is only formed because we all participate in this industrial, assembly-line grading. We use exam books, for heavens' sake! This is 2008 and these exams could be graded much more efficiently (and probably more accurately) if more of the grading was done online. One can easily imagine a distributed grading system in which readers from all over grade exams, over the Internet, that are either scanned in or taken completely online by the students. It's bound to be cheaper this way than paying for all 200+ of us to fly to a central location and then to house and feed us. It's also fairer for the student, IMO, because we would be able to spend more time on each exam attempting to grade it as accurately as we can. (Currently, because we only have 1 week to grade 100,000+ exams, a rate of 1 exam per minute is considered slow.) Yes there would be security and consistency issues but these can be worked out. And who knows, maybe ETS is working on this right now.

I guess the bottom line is, is it really fair to charge students the exam fee for purposes that are definitely worthwhile, but ultimately incidental, to the goal of student assessment?