Back from the AP reading

The grading of the exams went smoothly, with the entire set of 110,000 exams graded by the close of business on Wednesday night. Although students from other schools seemed to think that the problems were hard, the teachers and professors who graded the tests were not complaining about a lot of low scores. I guess that's a good sign!

The chief reader (Christine Franklin, from UGA) evaluates the distribution and sets the cut points for the different final scores based on how students performed on the repeated questions from previous years. That done, the scores have to be approved by the AP psychometric gurus and processed for release to students. In other words, your scores should be available on time.

My role at the reading was a little different this year. In past years I've been assigned to a grading group of 12 people headed by two table leaders, then trained to grade two problems from the regular exam according to the rubric. For seven full days the people in each group grade those two problems. For instance, a reader may grade question #5 (the moose problem) and the table leader checks the scoring. Since there are six problems on the test and this year over 500 readers, there are a lot of people grading the same problem. Once a problem has been graded, that test booklet is bundled up and passed to a group that grades another question, and the process continues until all of the problems have been graded. If a reader has a question, she asks her grading partner, then her table leader. If the problem is not yet resolved, the question goes to the question leaders.

This time Ms. Franklin put me in a grading group with a bunch of REALLY experienced readers (famous and incredibly important people in statistics, like one of the authors of a popular textbook) who graded the make-up exam. We also graded two questions each (plus one from the regular exam), but we were the only ones to grade those problems. When we had questions, the people who wrote the rubric were right at our tables to answer and help us resolve any issues. Since none of you took the make-up exam this year, I never had to worry about accidentally grading one of my own students' tests, but every time readers commented on how great an answer was I told them that it must have been one of MY students. :) The trick with grading the make-up exam is that we can never divulge the contents of the exam to anyone, but that shouldn't be a problem because I have already forgotten it all!

You may be wondering (as I did) how I qualified for that special grading group. I think that they chose the very best former table leaders and other important people they could find, then filled in the rest with some experienced people from Georgia. Clarification: some of the important people were also from Georgia, so the line between the superstars and the poser (me) was blurred. Oh yeah, and they said that we we were selected because we were fast graders. I thought you'd enjoy that.

A few students, usually those who are stumped by a problem, write notes to the graders asking for mercy or generosity in grading. I'm sure they're joking, but they might be surprised to know how wonderful, helpful, and patient the graders really are. About half of the graders are college instructors who give up a week of their summers or coveted summer courses to validate this process for our students. The high school teachers are the ones who have attended or led workshops and conferences in statistics. Some of them haven't even ended their school years yet and have to pay their school districts back for the substitutes they needed. These people write the creative lessons published in books and shared online. They write the the textbooks and the study guides. They do it for students. They spend all day grading exams, then come back after dinner to hear a guest speaker talk about mathematical modeling or to share best practices. They are on constant lookout for ways to help their students understand statistics better.

This goes for the English Lit, French, and APUSH graders who were there at the same time, too.

I am honored and humbled to be invited to participate in this process with these amazing people.

Video time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTPhZcxnBSE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac3CtHYo5rY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKkBBVxI5qU&feature=related