Record H5 · 1919 / 1928
H5: 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 heard a very familiar sound behind us and upon looking back we saw just what we expected, my father’s bull, coming on close behind us. The attraction for the bull seemed to be our red ties so we pulled them off as we rode and let them fly; but alas! Mine caught on the back of my bicycle and the bull was so near that it was impossible to stop to take it off, so I exerted all my energy in getting over the bridge.
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
- 6.5. Median global scale judgment by institutional composition assessors; not a classroom grade.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
“6.50”
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimRed ties attract a pursuing bull, and a snag increases the danger.
Ideas and relationships7 coded units. Recognition, pursuit, inferred attraction, attempted decoy, snag, inability to stop, and escape effort form a contingency chain.
AbstractionEmerging
Causal reasoningMultistep
Qualification / counterargumentReversal
Evidence usePersonal Detail
OrganizationDetection Plan Complication Response
Sentence controlControlled
Lexical precisionSpecific
Articulation limitThe red-tie cause is inferred and untested; ‘seemed’ signals uncertainty.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Scale value 6.50 is above the 5.40 median but below Sample 11 and high non-Virginia anchors; included so ordinary does not mean only at or below median.