According to DPI:
– Fourth grade results showed that 50 percent of students scored proficient in 2005-06, an improvement from 2004-05 when 49.3 percent scored at this level.
– For seventh graders, a total of 46.2 percent scored proficient in writing, down slightly from 2004-05 when the proficient rate was 46.7 percent.
– At the 10th grade level, 53.2 percent of students scored proficient, an increase from the 2004-05 year when 47.8 percent scored at this level.
The bottom line: Only half of the state’s students are proficient writers. But these results do not truly capture writing proficiency because the state uses a more lenient scale to assess spelling and grammar than they do to assess content.
