Hi, yourself, Carolyn. I see you're not at Four C's either.
 
You asked a couple of questions, preceded by this paragraph, which itself
was preceded by other material I've deleted:
 
>The WAT has been a fine instrument for placement as long as seasoned
>teachers were reading it.  We tended to be relatively forgiving
>of errors in the first two categories but to take those in the third
>so seriously that students who committed them were placed into
>basic writing courses -- where they could receive appropriate
>instruction aimed at written language development -- even if the
>ideas and organization of their WAT essays were relatively strong.
>
>And we never did think the WAT worked well with ESL students,
>even for placement.
>
>(1) Is the kind of experienced reading I just described a violation of
>holistic scoring principles?
>
>(2) What are "mechanics," anyway?  :)
>
 
I've often discussed question 1 with colleagues as we did holistic scoring.
The consensus seemed to be that we were reading with an unstated
"threshold" of tolerance for errors in mechanics. If a student crossed that
threshold, he or she was put into basic writing no matter how good the
contents of the piece might be. And we often tinkered with ways to quantify
the threshold. For instance, in reading papers of those who had just
"finished" basic writing, we would say that five sentence errors (comma
splices, fragments, fused sentences) would result in the student being
retained in basic writing. In general, though, quantifying didn't work.
That's why we needed the experienced graders that you talk about.
 
I agree that ESL students constitute a separate case, and I tried to get
them into special sections of basic writing that could address the
particular problems of ESL.
 
What are mechanics? I use the term as shorthand for everything that is not
contents--spelling, punctuation, syntax, usage, etc. Of course, I wouldn't
claim that it's always possible to separate mechanics from contents.
 
How do YOU define mechanics?
 
Bill
 
William J. McCleary                     Editor: Composition Chronicle
Associate Prof. of English              Viceroy Publications
Coordinator of Secondary English        3247 Bronson Hill Road
SUNY at Cortland                        Livonia, NY 14487
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