Test Scores, Course Grades, and Bottom Lines / Susan Miller.

There is often little correlation between objective tests of writing or writing components and grading by teachers. The technology that can be applied to student writing evaluation lags behind a reasoned rhetorical explanation of test results. Evaluations of writing are inadequate unless they are interpreted within a rhetorical context that includes who the writer is and for whom that writer is writing. Questions of quality thereby become part of a complicated context of interaction between specific writers and specific readers. The motivation and attitudes of both contributors to the meaning of a text ought not to be ignored; therefore, it is important to devise new descriptions of the affective as well as the cognitive aspects of writing and reading and to account for the predispositions of writer and reader. An interpretive theory informed by measurements of variables in dynamic, organic situations is needed. (TJ)

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