5. Comments on how this essay meets ETS criteria for a "6:"

This essay demonstrates clear competence in writing on both the rhetorical and syntactic levels

• •By introducing the key points of a student's psychological makeup, school policy, parents, community, and teacher as factors influencing how much a student learns, and by IMPLICITLY developing the factors in subsequent paragraphs with a case study of a teenage girl, the essay has convincingly opposed that "teachers should be paid according to how much their students learn." Most likely, readers would consider this argument very seriously.

• •Directly stating his argument in the first line of the introduction and providing five factors which account for how much a student learns, the writer clearly frames the essay around the writing topic. He then introduces a believable illustration in order to support how he has arrived at his conclusion. But instead of developing the five factors in subsequent paragraphs, he implicitly shows how the factors apply through the story of the teenage girl. For example, the essay uses the story to make implicit connections to each of the five factors: psychological makeup and parents (i.e., her imitating her parents drug addictive behavior and her not being able to realize the destructive effects of drugs), community (i.e., the neighbor's reluctance to contact social services), school policy (i.e., the school's decision to pay teachers based only on learning), and teacher (i.e., the teacher instructs the little girl that drug abuse is wrong).



• •The argument is brought to a convincing closure as the writer interprets the significance of how the story shows that teachers should not be paid based on how much a child learns since it might be impossible to exclude other variables other than the teacher's effective or ineffective instruction that might prevent a student from mastering the subject material of a classroom.



• •Paragraphs two uses a very specific situation of a young girl to support the thesis, indicating two important writing awareness skills: that the writer understands it is important to support generalizations with specific details and that the writer is aware of the importance of maintaining a clear focus while providing a reasonable amount of detail within the thirty minute timed constraint.



• •The essay displays consistent facility in the use of punctuation, word choice, sentence structure, and word forms. For example, the writer is able to nouns (i.e., his argument, an illustration...), adjectives (i.e., psychological makeup, is simply unfair...), adverbs (i.e., didn't learn obviously, strongly oppose ...), and verbs (i.e., disregards, might be..) both in the correct position within the sentence as well as with the appropriate word ending, thus giving the essay a very high level of polish.



• •The essay has a variety of sentence structures, some of which are multiple subordinate ideas within the same sentence (i.e., It is clear from my illustration that if teachers were to be paid based on how much their students learn, then the teacher in this illustration would get paid less, and that is simply unfair). Within the structure of a compound sentence, the writer uses an adverb clause which is embedded within a noun clause. And inside of theadverb clause

is another noun clause, all of which suggest that the writer has a good sense of the complex-compound sentence structure which so few higher end TWE essays exemplify.

• •The writer also has a good command of vocabulary (i.e., apparently, aggravate, complexity, anxiety ...) and transitional words (i.e., yet, the first step, thus, another way, in conclusion, for example, however...) to demonstrate appropriate word choice.