Why deprive students of helpful writing tools on tests?

Education has a habit of introducing students to useful tools and then taking those tools away at test time.

It’s happening again this year.

If you have a child in public school, chances are good they’ve caught a case of testing fever. High school students in Ohio, for example, are taking or preparing to take various state-mandated, end-of-course tests and College Board Advanced Placement exams, many of which involve writing.

While the content of each writing assessment may be different, one element is depressingly common: Students may not use tools considered basic to almost any working writer.

The tests prohibit students from taking advantage of spell-checking programs, online dictionaries or online thesauruses. They can’t even use physical dictionaries and thesauruses.

By the way, the old-school plural of “thesaurus” is “thesauri,” which I looked up online while typing this piece, something students would be barred from doing on a writing test.

In some cases, even typing, a common composing method since the late 1800s, is prohibited. This, in an educational system that has prioritized typewritten work for decades, and which was so high-tech just two years ago that teachers were delivering curriculum through Zoom links.

But when high-stakes testing rolls around, it’s back to the Stone Age.

Just as unfortunate as the prohibition of various lexicographical tools is the failure to give students time for more than rudimentary revision. Gone are peer reviews and thoughtful reassessment of problematic sentences. Nobody gets to phone a friend on the AP English Language essay, even though peer assessment is integral to that curriculum throughout the year.

There are purists — I know you’re out there, I can feel your fiery breath on the back of my neck — who argue that spell checkers and revision time lead to final products that do not reflect what students know, but are more a function of how skillfully they take advantage of various resources.

But when teachers and schools prioritize such resources as useful (which they are) and teach with them throughout the year (as they should), why aren’t students allowed to use them on high-stakes tests? What is the point of preaching that the essence of good writing is rewriting if students aren’t given time to do it on a test, if the first draft, which they’ve been taught is merely a starting point, becomes the finished product?

If we trace arguments in favor of traditional pencil-and-paper samples back far enough, we discover a seldom-articulated fear: On some unspecified future day, students will be faced with a writing task where they cannot use technology, leaving them naked with their many writing flaws exposed.

A similar argument was advanced for many years to keep students away from calculators. It’s an odd belief that their survival may someday be contingent upon figuring out 18 percent of 287 with only paper and pencil. But if I’m living in such a world, maybe one where civilization itself has been annihilated, I’m probably too busy killing giant, mutated crickets with a rusty shovel to be overly concerned about math.

Seriously, though, I understand writing is produced for many reasons and under many conditions — text messages, emails, research essays, novels and timed pieces among them.

Some writing samples are meant to gauge basic writing competence, while others are intended to determine more sophisticated skills. All timed essays are considered first drafts and are evaluated as such, but so what?

A goal of education is to produce more students who excel at writing as opposed to identifying those who barely clear the bar. Given this, evaluating writing portfolios instead of timed-writing samples is far more beneficial to students and schools. Let a group of evaluators look at each student’s efforts to write arguments, analyses, and narratives, along with examples of the writing process, from first through final drafts.

Yes, this would take longer, with an evaluation process far more subjective and open to bias. These are issues that need to be addressed.

Granted, slapping an arbitrary number on an essay is far easier and more efficient. Yet the production of good writing is seldom easy or efficient. Why should the evaluation process get a pass?

And if these arguments aren’t convincing, then let those who would be horrified to send out even a casual email without using a spellchecker be the first to share an unedited piece of writing with the world, something we ask students to do all the time on tests.

Crickets, again, and not the giant mutated kind.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.