Record H4 · 1919 / 1928
H4: 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
One day we started out, and he did very nicely for a while, until he saw a automobile and then the fun began. He tried to turn around right in the road, and when he found that he could not he started to run. There were only two of us in the cart, my brother and myself and neither were very strong.
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
- 5.933. Median global scale judgment by institutional composition assessors; not a classroom grade.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
“5.933”
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimAn automobile frightens a pony and causes it to bolt.
Ideas and relationships5 coded units. Initial calm, automobile stimulus, failed turn, running, and weak riders form an escalation.
AbstractionConcrete
Causal reasoningMultistep
Qualification / counterargumentFailed Alternative
Evidence usePersonal Detail
OrganizationCalm Trigger Escalation
Sentence controlMeaning Clear
Lexical precisionFunctional
Articulation limitThe referent of ‘he’ depends on prior context, and reflection or resolution is absent from the excerpt.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Scale value 5.933 is moderately above the 5.40 survey median but below high anchors; school and identity were unavailable to selectors.