Record H3 · 1919 / 1928
H3: 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
When we reached a narrow place in the road at a corner, another car was coming towards us but we didn’t know it until we were about three feet away from that car. Both cars were going very fast and if the brakes hadn’t been in good order, we would never have gottened home alive. The two cars hit each other and we were thrown out of our seats.
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
- 5.506. Median global scale judgment by institutional composition assessors; not a classroom grade.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
“5.506”
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimGood brakes prevented a worse outcome even though the cars collided.
Ideas and relationships6 coded units. Narrow road, unseen approach, distance, speed, brakes, collision, and ejection form a causal counterfactual.
AbstractionEmerging
Causal reasoningMultistep
Qualification / counterargumentCounterfactual
Evidence usePersonal Detail
OrganizationSituation Risk Result
Sentence controlMeaning Clear
Lexical precisionSpecific Mixed
Articulation limitThe life-or-death conclusion may be rhetorical; visibility and braking are not explained.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Scale value 5.506 is almost exactly the survey median 5.40 and is the strongest individual middle-band fit.