Record H2 · 1919 / 1928
H2: 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
It was the afternoon of a day in July that we started off in an automobile to go to a place about twenty miles away. Before we had gotten half way something happened to the engine and we couldn’t go very fast.
Two 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
- 5.062. Median global scale judgment by institutional composition assessors; not a classroom grade.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
“5.062”
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimA trip is delayed by engine trouble.
Ideas and relationships4 coded units. Season/time, transport, distance, halfway point, and mechanical effect form a setup and complication.
AbstractionConcrete
Causal reasoningSimple
Qualification / counterargumentNone
Evidence usePersonal Detail
OrganizationSetup Then Complication
Sentence controlControlled
Lexical precisionGeneral
Articulation limitThe fault and any larger claim are not developed.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Scale value 5.062 is 0.34 below the Virginia median 5.40 and was selected blind to school to mark a score step.