How Common Core tests are scored: PARCC and Pearson graders can shoot for 60 answers per hour
WESTERVILLE, Ohio – Grading a student answer each minute could easily be overwhelming for the 121 graders at Pearson Inc.'s Ohio scoring center for the new Common Core exams from PARCC.
But this operation in a suburban office complex outside Columbus is a very focused assembly line operation: Scoring 55 to 80 answers an hour is no problem for most.
"I feel like I've been doing well," said scorer Launica Jones, who previously worked as a substitute teacher in both Cleveland and Columbus and started grading PARCC exams last month. "I've actually been told to slow down a few times."
It's a pace that works here, partly because the dozens of full-time graders in Ohio spend their eight-hour shifts focused on just third grade math tests. If your third grader took the PARCC math exams this spring, there's a good chance that one of their answers was scored a laptop here at this Westerville office.
They don't grade English here this year and don't score any other grades either. Those are for the other dozen PARCC scoring centers to worry about. (The pace for English essay questions is a bit slower, but still quick: 17-19 per hour for high school exams.)
Graders don't score whole tests. They work with just one question at a time, grading that single question a few hundred times a day.
And each grader has been drilled several times in how students should answer that particular question before they start.
Michelle Kohlhorst said she has also managed the speed just fine. Since starting as a full-time grader April 13, she has scored a succession of five third grade math questions. Each time, she said, she and other graders pick up speed the more they work with a new question.
"When we first start training on an item, I think, 'Whoa! This is confusing'," Kohlhurst said. "The more we talk about it and go through training, it gets a little easier."
Inside a test grading center
PARCC, the Common Core testing coalition Ohio belongs to, and Pearson, the company hired to provide and grade the mostly-online exams, offered a few reporters a chance to visit the Columbus scoring facility today.
We cannot talk in detail about how any individual questions are scored. But the visit was a look inside a process that is often mysterious to teachers and parents who wonder what happens when their students' answers go into the corporate black box of Pearson.
In person, scoring is a very human process, with people who are between jobs or seeking a little extra pay- $12 per hour - trying to follow a template to give consistent scores.
Signs taped to posts inside the scoring room remind scorers of their mission: "The right score, the right feedback, for every learner, everytime."
Scoring the first round of PARCC exams given this spring is a large task logistically, even for Pearson, an international corporation that does testing and educational publishing, said Bob Sanders, Pearson's national director of performance scoring.
The second round of PARCC tests – the End of Year exams – that have started in Ohio already will be graded entirely by computers. But the first round of tests – the"performance-Based" exams that students already took – require students to write longer answers.
That leaves 54 million answers from kids in 11 states for Pearson to score for PARCC.
So Pearson has hired 14,500 scorers – about 3,400 working in regional testing centers How Common Core tests are scored: PARCC and Pearson graders can shoot for 60 answers per hour | cleveland.com:
