Closing the Gap between High School Writing Instruction and College Writing Expectations - 0 views
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Amanda Jones on 12 Oct 11According to the article, the critical difference between high school and college is that "high school education is designed to be standardized and quantifiable," while "college education is designed to be theoretical" (Fanetti 78). However, the authors do not lay the blame with either the high school or college writing instructors. Instead, the blame lies with standardized testing in high school curriculum. To meet standards, high school instructors must sacrifice certain types of writing for 'test writing', even though standardized test writing virtually disappears after high school. Thus, the skills needed for standardized test writing must be untaught in college. This seems wasteful for high school and college instructors. The article compares high school to a factory, in which the student is the product and standardized testing is quality control. Through the process, students become "mass-produced and measured everywhere by the same instrument" (Fanetti 80). To close the gap between high school and college, the authors' suggest that the purpose of high school should be redesigned completely. High school curriculum should view all students as college bound, whether they truly are or not. This will great better writing skills for all students and prevent extra work for secondary and post-secondary instructors. Also, we need to get rid of standardized testing completely since it does more damage than good, especially in the writing skills of students.