Page 198 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

REMEDIATING WRITING ASSESSMENT 165
REMEDIATING WRITING ASSESSMENT
165
ent—that means students shouldn't realize they are involved in a
writing test situation.
This overarching interface presence suggests that the software as-
sessment programs are not authentic, and over time, it is plausible
that students will try to write solely for the test or will devise systems
to try to cheat the test. Cheating the test with these assessment soft-
ware programs simply means students will discover that they only
need to have the keywords presented in certain places and the remain-
der of the writing can be little more than babble. Or the writing can be
vapid as long as the keywords or key concepts are presented in the
text. Beating the machine in this manner relegates learning back to its
days as rote instruction; students merely have to memorize the sur-
face information and regurgitate it back on paper to pass the course.
In short, reproduction outweighs production. Writing assessment be-
comes little more than refashioned indirect assessment.
However, as teaching writing with computers occurs with greater
frequency, especially at the K-12 level where students become more
familiar with various e-texts at a younger age, and teachers along
with their students discover the multitude of possibilities that exist
when writing e-texts, it will become increasingly more difficult to
impose the types of control inherent in the Intelligent Essay Assessor
and E-rater programs. The claims of objectivity in writing assess-
ment that software programmers offer now will very likely be chal-
lenged, just as multiple-choice writing tests and holistic essay
grading have been over the last three decades. And all of us will be at
square one again, trying to determine what "the basics" are for
evaluating e-texts in ways that demonstrate accountability.
Because there is no genuine objective method for writing assess-
ment in either print-based or pixel-based composition, writing spe-
cialists have to work harder to explain to various constituencies
why language standards have changed in the networked age and
why writing assessment criteria have to change as well. One of the
reasons why standards are changing in writing for electronic
spaces connects to the power to control language. In the past,
monks, academics, publishers, journalists, and schoolteachers con-
trolled written language. It was they who dictated what proper us-
age was and how it looked on paper. These individuals were the
audience, and many of us as students wrote for them and their ap-
proval. Their approval gave students' writing legitimacy. Their ap-
proval determined accountability.