I uh, apologize in advance for the wall of text. It started out shorter.

# TL;DR

- I don't think the questions are unreasonable
- I'm not surprised the poet says she can't answer them
- I agree with you that the point of analysis is the process, but that gets tested in writing assessments
- reading assessments get bad rap because people forget reading/understanding the questions is just as important as reading/understanding the texts

# BODY

Before reading the whole article (so before reading her analysis of the questions near the end), I followed the source links from the first section to try answering the 5 questions about "A Real Case" myself.

I got them all correct and (discounting the initial time taken to read the poem) spent more time scrolling up and down in the pdf to refer back to the text than I did thinking about the questions.

This is a reading assessment for 7th graders. Perhaps all the commotion in the article and in the news and in this thread is because people are assuming that it is assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand poetry. I don't think this is true at all. I think it's assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand questions.

The question of whether the ability to read and understand poetry is of lasting value may be up in the air, but the ability to read and understand questions is an essential communication skill in modern life, imo. The material the questions are about is - not quite incidental, but honestly no more than half of the picture.

The single question that I spent more time on than all the others combined was 35. Maybe my approach to answering a question that I considered poorly worded (at first) might be of interest.

Here it is, with the stanza it concerns included and the highlighted lines marked:

--> My mood’s as welcome as
--> incoming dog breath,
--> or a terminal case of split ends.
--> I sparkle like a dust rag,
I could attract mosquitoes -
maybe - not friends.

35) The imagery in these lines helps the reader understand-

A) the shift in the speaker’s attitude
B) the speaker’s unpleasantness
C) why the speaker has no friends
D) what the speaker thinks of others

And the issue there was that one of the two possible answers, B, implies the other, C. If the speaker is unpleasant, that is a perfectly good reason for the speaker to have no friends.

I eventually decided on B for two reasons:

1) Friends are only ever mentioned after the highlighted lines. To put it in programming terms (sorry!) a first-time reader streaming the poem (i.e., the way most people read) would lack a mental "parser" labelled "now the speakers's talking about friends" with which to process the highlighted lines. My experience is that most straightforward writers (the ones we can reasonably expect 7th graders to parse) do not expect their readers to manage their own mental "heap" of unexplained information and compare all of its contents to each new bit of information received as reading proceeds. When unexplained information does come along ("Where did my bike go? I parked it right here!") it's usually clearly labelled as such, so the reader need only maintain the heap of "information the author labelled for me as unknown". This is both less work for the reader than figuring out the labels on their own, and requires them to remember less. When this sort of labeling is not done, it's called a mystery novel.

[Aside: of course, writers who are not targeting 7th graders can and do write however they want; a favorite example of mine is Neal Stephenson, who seems to take perverse pleasure in quietly building up a narrative out of elements that he introduces so familiarly and with so little fanfare or detail that you swear he must have explained this thing a few pages back and you just missed it somehow, but after checking the previous 50 pages you can't find any mention of it so you eventually give up and continue and 150 pages later you read a paragraph that tumbles around in your head for a few seconds and then it clicks snugly into place in your heap and completely illuminates the question you had earlier. And I love him for it.]

2) Most of the rest of the poem is composed of atomic ideas expressed in one or two lines (with the exception of the first stanza that keeps the "sickness" ball bouncing for 5 lines). To match the rest of the poem, it seemed more likely the highlighted stanza expressed four nearly-independent thoughts: I smell bad, I'm irritating, I'm boring, and I'm unattractive. In that structure, the concept of friends is restricted to the "scope" of the final thought, and only used to illustrate just how unattractive the speaker is. None of the other thoughts are involved. As such, C is unrelated to the highlighted lines but B is still a good match.

Of course, most of this was unconscious when I was doing it. I wrote down B with about 70% confidence and kept going, because that's what you do on a timed test. Now that I put my reasoning it all down on paper, I'm much more confident in the result. (It helps that it turned out to be correct!)

If I recall correctly, I got a perfect score on the reading section of the SAT. I helped several of the international students at my school study for that section specifically, and my top recommendation was that they read books. I imagine that I'm to the left of the bell curve of reading speed/comprehension; I had read Ivanhoe by age seven or eight and the Lord of the Rings by age nine. (the hard part was getting started; after my mother had read the first two or three chapters to me, I got hooked and read the rest myself.)

Still, I have no aspirations as a poet or author. Likewise, I'm sure there are many superb poets who are quite terrible at analytical thinking. If poet was truly unable to answer the test questions confidently, I'm not surprised. On the other hand, if the poet could actually answer the questions just fine but was being hyperbolical to frame a strong point about how test writers are ignoring author intent and the result is bad test questions, that would not surprise me either. (After all, it makes sense that an author would take the conservative position in the "death of the author" discussion!)

You [my parent commenter, if you're still here!] stressed that the the problem with the test is that it has 1 correct answer for each question, and so cannot accurately test the test-taker's ability to perform a process for which the point is not the result, but the ability to justify the validity one's process.

I agree with you!

But testing someone's ability to justify their analysis is called a writing assessment. What we are dealing with is a reading assessment.

This assessment measures the test-taker's ability to internalize the analysis process performed by the test-writer, apply that process to the text themselves, and demonstrate that they were successful by accurately predicting which conclusion the test-writer arrived at.

In other words, this is testing the test-taker's ability to accurately and productively process thoughts that originated outside of themselves. This is something that 7th graders are not very good at without practice. (This is one contributor, I think, to why bullying is common at those ages - kids have not yet learned to empathize.) This is a good skill to learn, and a good skill to test.