The Avida program now resides at Michigan State University, where it has been growing and changing for years. The digital creatures number in the billions and have colonized more than two hundred computers Each digital organism consists ol a pattern of code. | Score and Analysis of This Response Score 5 This essay received the highest possible score of 5 because it does many things well. First it is extremely well organized. It has a clear introduction body paragraphs and a conclusion. It is also easy to follow because the essay uses appropriate transitions to link ideas. Also the essay is of a good length 199 words. More important the author mentions several specific examples from the talk and shows how they are different from the points in the reading. That level of detail is necessary for a top score on die TOEFL. It is important to note that this essay is by no means perfect. The writer misspelled professor throughout the essay and makes a number of errors with subject-verb agreement for example the teacher cast doubt instead of casts doubt . However the errors do not detract from the overall message of the essay. A Lower-Scoring Response Following is an example of a lower-scoring response to the first practice drill. In early cultures there were different ways of using wheat. Some cultures use wheat for making bread and some ohers used it to make beer. It is said by the instructor though that it is the beer that was made first. Another thing is that fermenting of the wheat created beer not bread. The professor said that the people would not bake the foam but instead they would drink it like beer. the lecture shows that early peoples rarely used fire to make things. They didn t think to make the bread form the wheat that they had ground. That is to say that it seems like beer was more likely to be make by people than was bread. Score and Analysis of This Response Score 2 This weaker response scored much lower remember the scale is from 0 to 5 because the essay has numerous problems. The first problem is that the ideas in the essay are not clearly expressed. The writing style makes it difficult to understand exactly what the author is trying to demonstrate. Also the ideas are not linked together making the essay .
