Mr.

Ninth Grade Reflective Essay

By: Mike McClintock

Through comparison of my 8th grade PSSA results and my 9th grade Explore results it is evident that the two tests reveal similar outcome. The PSSA test focused only on two major subjects covering mathematics and reading, while the Explore test covered English, mathematics, reading, and science. The Explore test placed me in the 99th percentile overall with a score of 24 points. My highest score came from the English section where I scored a combined 25 points (11 of 12 in usage/mechanics and 12 of 12 in rhetorical skills) placing me in the 100th percentile. My next best score was for science in which I scored 24 points resulting placement in the 98th percentile. To my surprise, my two lowest scores tied at 23 points in the 95th percentile for mathematics and reading. Because the tests have only two correlating sections (reading and mathematics), it is only possible to compare those two sections.

Unexpectedly, the results seemed to match up. For the PSSA my scores for reading and math were extremely close. I earned a 1734 out of a possible 2300 (75%) for mathematics and a 1722 out of a possible 2349 (73%) for reading. Similarly my scores for the mathematics and reading sections of the Explore test were exactly the same at 23 out of a possible 25. However the percentages of the two different tests do not correlate as well. For the Explore test my percentage of correct answers (92% for both math and reading) was much higher than those of the PSSA scores (75% for math and 73% for reading). Explanations for such different percentages might include that the PSSA test questions were more difficult than the Explore test questions, and/or I might have learned a lot more from 8th to 9th grade. Disregarding the inconsistency of percentages, the results of both tests show that my mathematic abilities and reading abilities are about equal.

I found the fact that I scored evenly on my reading and mathematic sections for both tests pretty unexpected considering that my interest levels for those two subjects are very different; I enjoy mathematics much more than I do reading. I also feel that I am stronger mathematically and because of that I would expect my math scores to be much higher than my reading scores, however, that was not the case. I was not as surprised to see that I did extremely well on the English section as I do enjoy writing and I think that it is my second strongest subject (after mathematics). According to the Explore results, science was my second best subject, after English, and I feel that that matches up well with my interest areas as I truly enjoy the sciences. I feel that I my interest areas are covered in every section of this test as I enjoy learning about many different things. The one subject that is certainly not in any of my interest areas