Collections - 9. Chapter 9 -- The Red-Headed League

The Red-Headed League

There’s a Sherlock Holmes story called “The Red-Headed League” about a man who sits at a desk all day hand copying The Encyclopedia Britannica. About a year ago, I kind of joined that league.

I grade essays for a living. It’s a slick job: I push out of bed at 8:25, and I’m working at 8:30, after a nineteen-step commute. I don’t have to drive. I don’t have to shave. I don’t even have to dress if I don’t want to, though syntax and nudity don’t mix.

I grade essays for four tests: the CAHSEE – the California High School Exit Exam; the EAP – the California college and university Early Assessment Program test; the GRE – the Graduate Record Exam; and the TOEFL – an English as a Second Language test.

The GRE is hardest. I did passably well on it 40 years ago, despite taking it in an underheated classroom at Antioch College. By the time I finished, I had a cold.

The TOEFL is next, and every time I grade these essays, I think it’s lucky I learned English without thinking.

The EAP is simple but handwritten, unlike the other two tests. Of course, almost no one uses longhand anymore – which is now called cursive. They mainly block-print.

The CAHSEE is scrawled. It’s offered in the 10^th grade and most of us could have aced in 4^th. The essay basically instructs: Write anything you want, just don’t drool. Yet some students can’t do that. They start writing iF i cud right Any thin i want... then stop. We’re taught to scroll, optimistically, to the bottom of the four given pages, but there’s usually nothing there to read.

We score in eight-hour sessions. We are mainly deftly analytic English profs with Ph.Ds. I’m the dumb kid, with only my MFA in design. I feel as lost as I did with college Tennyson.

Our sessions have two fifteen-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch. I walk the dogs in those – a half-mile in the breaks and a mile at lunch. I sometimes need the walks more than the dogs do. I’ve rarely worked at a desk

The students have a minimum of 30 minutes to write these essays – that’s for the GRE – and an unlimited amount of time to torture out, iF i cud right Any thin... It takes between a second and three minutes to read an essay, and size matters.

If you can glance at the page and see there are fewer than fifty words, you probably have a 1 on your hands. The score range is generally 1 to 6. Though if the few words are just copied from the prompt, the score’s often a 0. On some tests, it’s a NS – no score. On other tests, if there’s even one mark on the page it’s a 1, but if it’s blank, it’s a NS. I don’t know why.

If the essay is a dozen lines, it might score a 2. Twenty lines, a 3. Above that is passing – a 4 – but excellent gets a 5 and outstanding a 6.

It takes three minutes to read those 6 essays, but you know they’re going to be 6s way before that. Still, you gotta read them, just in case the writer messes up. Then they go down. Sometimes, essays are very long and very bad, for all sorts of reasons. It could be a language problem: it’s the GRE but the writer couldn’t even pass the ESL. Sometimes, the essay’s just very short – if I could write anything...

Then there are the heartbreakers. You can tell the writer’s brilliant and probably literate in several complex languages. But English ain’t one of ‘em. It’s frustrating when I fight my way through one of these essays because I know how much brighter the writer is than I am. There’s often amazing complexity in the thoughts, but the words read like sushi. Or a latter day seer: Stopping from going badly is not making better. Playing with lion can be done but should not be.

Sometimes, I can recognize the country of the writer’s origin. There are references to Mao or Sachin Tendulkar. The latter, I’ve learned, is an Indian Cricket star. Sometimes, I can isolate the writer’s profession. Usually, it’s a branch of engineering or science. Often the writers aren’t college seniors, trying for American grad schools. They’re lawyers or established business professionals, hoping to change their lives. And you want to help. You can tell they deserve the chance. But they write like children.

I’m a great one to talk: my second language is Pig Latin. If I even had to ask for the bathroom in most countries, the best I could do is grab my crotch like Eminem and mug like Jerry Lewis. And these writers are often trying to analyze philosophical propositions. So when they accidentally type reslutting or mention The Giant Hardon Collider, I know what they mean. But unless they actually write it, I can’t give them credit. Instead of sending them off to Berkeley, I condemn them to life in a meat packing plant.

I also have to pass a test every morning before I work. It’s called norming. I read 10 pre-scored essays and have to match 6 out of 10 of their scores – 7 for the easier TOEFL, 3 out of 5 for the easiest CAHSEE. On the ones I miss, I can be off by one point, high or low. If I’m off by 2 points, even if I get everything else right, I flunk. If I fail the test three times in a row, I can’t work for the day. But the company is kind: they pay me for failing. It’s kind of like being a CEO.

I also have a Scoring Leader, sort of like Big Brother though they’re usually women. They spot check the essays I read, and they’re guided by monitors: for every twenty essays I read, usually two are pre-scored. My scoring leader can glance at my monitors, and if I’m messing up, Big Sis can check my other work. Then she’ll call.

“Let’s look at essay 8,” she might say, and I go back. The most exacting of these scoring leaders sometimes reads the entire essay to me as if that will get it through my dense skull. And she reads all the mistakes as they’re written. I know from context that mange is really manage, but she’ll read it mange and make the essay sound even worse. We’re taught to read supportively for the ESL, but she’s a GRE leader. No sentence fragments allowed.

And she’s not my only supervisor. There’s a time stamp whenever I start a batch of essays, and when I score one, it’s separately time stamped. When I first started, I’d sometimes get an e-mail from the company saying, “In Folder 3, there was a 8 minute lag between essays 6 & 7.” Or, “There was an 11 minute gap between the time you closed Folder 4 & opened 5.”

I once wrote back, “I was talking with my scoring leader at the time,” and that excused me, once. Since, then, I’ve learned to always have an essay in front of me when I’m talking to a scoring leader. That way, her time stamps match mine.

You’d think there’d be a high burn-out rate on this job, but some of my scoring leaders have been doing this for 20 years. And they remember the old days when all the essays were written by hand, and leaders and readers were flown in from all over the country, housed in good hotels, fed frequent snacks, and sat around tables scoring the essays. “It was like a paid convention,” one of them told me. “Wasn’t that a time!”

A lot of the scoring leaders are retired teachers, and I’m guessing a lot of the readers are underpaid adjuncts. And sometimes scoring leaders work as readers if there aren’t enough groups to lead. One morning 6 of the 10 readers assigned to a leader failed our test, and 2 of them were slumming scoring leaders.

“Russian Roulette,” my leader said when I reported in. “What did they think they were teaching us?”

Another time, a scoring leader told me, “The company isn’t monolithic. One man’s 6 is another man’s 4.” I like this guy because he reads like a jock: if an essay passes the squint test – that is, if you squint at it and it looks like a 4 – it probably is. Some of the women leaders might say, “You know that last sentence doesn’t make sense.” And they’re right. If you take out everything between the dashes – the parenthetic content they call it – you’re left with “...if an essay passes the squint test, it probably is.” As I said, women are often more precise readers.

Scoring also develops its own language. “That’s a low 3,” I’ve been told. “Almost a high 2.” Or “That’s the lowest 5 you’re ever going to see – a real squeaker.” You’d think it would be enough dividing into 7 scores, going from 0 to 6, but they all have sub-divisions. Still, I’ve never heard, “That’s a low NS.”

There’s something else, too: every essay used to be read by 2 readers, as a double check. And if the 2 scores were separated by more than a point, a third reader was brought in. Now, the second reader is a computer, guided by algorithms. Actually, I’m lying: the first reader is a computer, and we humans are just around to make the algorithms sharper. And the kicker is a computer can read an entire year of my work – 150 essays a day, 5 days a week, for 52 weeks – in 40 seconds.

The other question I’m sometimes asked is: Could I write one of these essays? Absolutely not – well, one of the bad ones, of course. And I could probably use the base SAT formula – intro, body, conclusion; thesis statement, topic sentences, details – to scrape by with a 4. But some of the best essays are longer than I could even type in type in 30 minutes, let alone type intelligently. I tend to rough things out, then revise, – the Kurt Vonnegut school of editing into coherence. Also, you have to acknowledge the value of a good education. In Bowling Green, we were taught Shakespeare by a nearsighted old guy who once mistook a pile of coats for a student and gave it a passing grade. Some of these GRE writers have the best minds of their generations and have been taught to analyze by the best minds of earlier generations. I can only read and appreciate.

Why do I do this? Dad Likes His Work – the name of an old James Taylor album. And I do. I liked design, and I still miss that. And I like writing, though reading essays forty-hours-a-week tends to keep me from that. But I like essay scoring. It stops me from goofing off. And it’s only seasonal.