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Highlands Today
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Getting It Write
Marc Valero/Highlands Today
From left: Hill-Gustat Middle School eighth-graders Izabela Benibanonde and Reshma Pinnamaneni work on a writing assignment Thursday in preparation for the FCAT Writing Plus exam they will take next week.
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Published: February 8, 2008
SEBRING — For about one-fifth of the students in Highlands County, next week is the start of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
The FCAT Writing Plus test will be administered to fourth-, eighth- and 10th- graders starting Tuesday. Testing will continue on Wednesday followed by two make-up testing days – Thursday and Friday (Feb. 15).
Hill-Gustat Middle School eighth-grader Laura Tenneson is calm and confident about the FCAT.
"It's just another test that you should try to do your best on," she said Thursday.
Tenneson's English teacher, Debra Moyer, pointed out that eighth-graders have it tough because they face all the tested subjects that FCAT covers – science, math, reading and writing.
Working in groups of three to five, Moyer's students wrote a conclusion for an essay about school safety.
"Tuesday is their test so I don't want to wear them out," Moyer said.
Vocabulary, organization, structure, punctuation and spelling are important for a student's essay to receive a score of 6, she said.
Parents receive a scale score on their student's performance on the entire writing test, including both the multiple choice and essay portion, and they will receive a score ranging from 1 to 6 on their student's essay.
Tenneson said, "it's one of my really good subjects; I like writing a lot. They give us the topics; we don't know what to expect."
She recalled a recent prompt: what would you prefer to do to help the environment: car pool or recycle or plant trees?
"I picked planting trees," Tenneson said.
The grade-10 FCAT Writing Plus test will become a graduation requirement beginning in 2010. This means that 10th-graders this school year must achieve a passing score on the Writing Plus assessment in addition to the current reading and mathematics requirements in order to graduate with a standard high school diploma.
With scale scores ranging from 100-500, the 10th-grade passing score for Writing Plus is 300.
The FCAT reading, math and science tests will be administered March 11-24. The test results are usually released in May.
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