Record MA24-2 · 2024–2025
MA24-2: Source Based Argument
Written and published in the 2024 grade 10 MCAS cycle. Massachusetts grade 10; exact age unknown.
Original student excerpt
Listening skills, not everyone has them, but everyone should work towards bettering ther. Listening skills are important because they can help you and other people engage in deeper and better conversations, they can help you gain better connections with your friends and family, and they also will help you be more social and get more sincere answers. When in conversations we need to listen to our companion to better understand them and gain the deeper meaning of their words.
Three consecutive sentences from the image response, visually checked; original language preserved.
Prompt and conditions
Exact prompt. Based on The Lost Art of Listening and ‘Talk Less. Listen More. Here’s How.,’ write an essay arguing why listening skills are important. Be sure to use information from both the excerpt and the article to develop your essay.
- Source conditions
- Two Supplied Texts; supplied texts; internet and grammar check forbidden.
- Time
- Exact duration unknown. Untimed through the school day.
- Production / archive
- CBT default, paper accommodation possible; individual mode unknown; anonymized image response in agency PDF.
- Drafting
- in-session work only; no post-feedback revision.
- Population and selection
- Massachusetts grade 10 operational MCAS response; age, district, mode, and supports unknown. Operational response purposively published as a score-point sample.
Scorer and feedback role
Institutional Assessor. Not an authenticated classroom-teacher feedback pair.
- Original source classification
- 6 of 8 — moderately developed ideas; top conventions. Idea Development 3/5 plus Standard English Conventions 3/3, sample D.
- Form
- Scoring Annotation; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
“The essay is moderately organized with little transition between paragraphs, but expression of ideas is adequate overall.”
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimListening improves conversation, relationships, reciprocity, and disclosure.
Ideas and relationships4 coded units. Attention, questions, reciprocity, and attentiveness are linked to trust and depth.
AbstractionEmerging
Causal reasoningInterpersonal Multistep
Qualification / counterargumentNone
Evidence useBoth Sources Multiple Short Quotes
OrganizationThree Benefits Previewed And Developed
Sentence controlMeaning Clear
Lexical precisionFunctional Mixed
Articulation limitBenefits overlap, and counterconditions or costs are not considered.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Idea Development 3/5 is moderately developed; Conventions 3/3 creates a conventions skew; not a state mean.