>While I don't have too much to say about holistic scoring itself, I have >observed that, after years of using it at my college, and after teaching >hundreds of writing students who have come through secondary schools where >it has been used, we are all suddenly starting to scream at our students' >syntactical ineptness. This may be post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, but >I think not. I doubt it's really true that teachers in high school or college use holistic scoring for day-to-day grading of papers. Holistic scoring may be used for placement, assessment, research, etc. But if you look at a set of papers graded by typical English teachers at whatever level, I think you'll find the vast majority of marks referring to spelling, punctuation, and "grammar." There will be a few comments on contents and global concerns, but not that many. (This may be because comments about contents were made on drafts, reserving comments on mechanics for evaluating the final editing; this is the optimistic view of how teachers grade papers.) In other words, despite advances in our knoweldge about scoring papers, I doubt that there are any great changes in what actually happens when writing teachers grade their students' papers. Bill McCleary 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 [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]