Record H1 · 1919 / 1928
H1: Personal Or Imagined Narrative
Written May–June 1919; published in the 1921 scale. First-year Virginia high school; exact age and modern grade equivalence unknown.
Original student excerpt
We were going along about 40 mile an hour, when, coming around a short came we saw another car coming at about an equal rate of speed. We missed him by about six inches. After that the road was stright and the speedometer showed that we were going seventy five mile a hour.
Three consecutive sentences from the typeset response; original spelling and punctuation preserved.
Prompt and conditions
Partially Exact prompt. Preserved wording: “the best story you can”; “The Most Exciting Ride I Ever Had”. Write the best story possible on the named topic; the story could use truth, imagination, or both.
- Source conditions
- Source Free; none.
- Time
- 30 minutes. One regular-session sitting; papers collected immediately.
- Production / archive
- not documented; do not impute handwriting; typeset faithful reproduction.
- Drafting
- none documented; treated as timed first response.
- Population and selection
- First-year pupils in 25 Virginia high schools in 12 counties; 887 analyzable pupils in the survey; individual anchor school and demographics unknown. Whole tested classes in a state survey; published scale points selected blind to school, not random pupils.
Scorer and feedback role
Institutional Assessor. Not an authenticated classroom-teacher feedback pair.
- Original source classification
- 4.509. Median global scale judgment by 96 trained composition assessors; not a classroom grade.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
“4.509”
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimSpeed and a near collision make the ride exciting.
Ideas and relationships4 coded units. Speed, curve, oncoming car, narrow miss, and later speed are coordinated chronologically and comparatively.
AbstractionConcrete
Causal reasoningSimple
Qualification / counterargumentNone
Evidence usePersonal Detail
OrganizationEvent Then Aftermath
Sentence controlMeaning Clear Uneven
Lexical precisionSpecific Mixed
Articulation limitNo interpretation beyond danger; ‘short came’ is opaque in the printed response.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Scale value 4.509 is below but near the independently reported Virginia median 5.40 and above the poorest anchors; selected as the lower edge, not as average by itself.