Who Reads This Stuff - Test Scoring as a Retirement Job

The proliferation of testing, and writing tests at that, lead BrooklynDodger to wonder who reads and grades. For the various state based tests, instead of using their own teachers, they seem to use contractors. This Post from the Washington Post reveals that the Educational Testing Service also contracts out this chore. Apparently, the high tech end of grading electronic forms is a core business, but reading is too labor intensive.

But, contractors need someone to do the work, so who would you sign up but temporary workers. And who could that be but teachers? In this case a retired teacher.

Dan Verner, who has taken on five times the average workload for scorers, follows rules that tell him to overlook small grammatical or spelling mistakes in SAT essays.

(By Margaret Thomas -- The Washington Post)

... so when he saw a newspaper story about the need for experienced educators to grade the new SAT essay question, he thought he might apply.

He learned that the essays were transmitted to official readers via the Internet, so could do the work on the computer in his den. He had always liked sitting and reading by himself.

... the 3,790 graders are more like Verner, a 57-year-old music lover who said he enjoys judging often unpredictable student essays just as much as he liked teaching for 32 years. He often reads the SAT entries wearing shorts, a T-shirt labeled "Wonderbread" and no shoes while Nacho the family cat slumbers in a chair beside him.

...Having never applied for work since 1971, he thought he was just having an introductory telephone chat with a woman from Pearson Educational Measurement, the Iowa City-based company that won the contract to score the essay question. But when, after 15 minutes of pleasant conversation, he asked when he would get his job interview, she said, "You just had it."

...
Training consisted of 17 hours of reading sample essays, doing 10 at a time and then being assessed on his scoring. He consulted with trainers when he strayed too far from the judgment of the College Board, which administers the SAT, of what should merit a 6 (clear and effective) or a 1 (murky and disorganized).
...Early news reports suggested that SAT readers might take less than a minute to judge each essay. But Verner and Pearson officials said the actual time per essay is closer to 2 1/2 minutes. Eventually, Verner said, "I got my mind right. It was like being in a zone."
... At 1 p.m. on the Tuesday after each Saturday SAT, a 10-day essay scoring period opens during which certified readers can log on to the Pearson Web site at any time except 1 to 8 a.m. and start scoring.

...Scorers are paid $17 an hour, with time and a half if they work more than 40 hours a week. ...More than 1.4 million SAT essays have been scored since the test debuted in March, each being read by two graders. ...Verner said he, too, is a critic of high-stakes tests, particularly the Standards of Learning tests in Virginia, but he said he thinks the SAT writing test is a fair and useful measure. ...

Scorers call this "the plethora effect" because many students believe "plethora" is a College Board word and "use it inordinately and often inappropriately in their essays," Verner said.