How to score summary writing essays for the CXC English A exam

How to score summary writing essay questions for the CXC English A exam

So, now that you have

a) CXC past paper type summary writing questions to practice on

and

b) Directions on how to compose summary essays

The next step is to assess your summary essays to make sure that you are following the directions accurately.

How to score CXC English A summary writing questions

There are three (3) things you need to do and they are listed below:

1) Get a study buddy to work with.

Once you have CXC past paper type summary questions to practice on, you may be asking yourself, “How do I know if I am doing the right thing in my answers?”

Well, the first thing we suggest here is that you do not practice alone, get a study buddy to work with. You can help each other improve your summary writing skills. When someone else is scoring your summary, they can be more objective that you can. “Why?” you ask, well, because they cannot read your mind so they will only score what you have written and nothing else –just like an examiner would.

2) Learn how to use a scoring rubric

When you have a study buddy to work with, what happens next? What’s next is that you both need to become familiar with a scoring rubric. Yes, I said it, “a scoring rubric”, and no, it’s not a cuss word either. ;-)

What is the scoring rubric?

A scoring rubric is a scoring tool that you and your buddy can use to help identify where each of you is good in writing summaries and where you need to work on your skills.

The rubric is made up of a list of things that CXC examiners look for when they are correcting summary essays. We have identified these things from an analysis of CXC English A subject reports and used them to construct our rubric. Next, we created “skill levels” in the rubric – they are a way to check how well you are performing on the things that the CXC examiners want in the summaries. Good right?

How do I use this rubric?

Well, when you are correcting your buddy’s summary, you are checking to see which skill level the summary is at for each CXC criteria. If there are mistakes in any area, you note which skill level you think the summary is at. When you are finished, you check the overall skill levels for all the critera. Next, you send the summary back to your buddy with your completed rubric to let him know which CXC exam criteria s/he needs to work on to get better at summary writing. Sound difficult? Okay, I will show you how to do one. (Coming soon!)

3) Practice writing and scoring CXC past paper type summary essay questions

What else do I need?

Practice. That’s what you need now, practice. practice, practice and more practice, that is the most important thing. Practice writing summaries AND practice scoring summaries. Do you want to know something else? The more summaries you score, the better you will become at writing them. It sounds strange I know, but that’s how it works. The more you see the mistakes that other people are making; the more you learn not to make them yourself in your own summary writing. So I repeat again, practice and more practice in both writing AND scoring summary essays. (Did I say practice? :-))

So where is the rubric?

Here is the rubric for scoring CXC summary essays.