Sometimes students will try to achieve high WPM scores by tricking ReadAloud. They do this in one of two ways.
- Reading a short excerpt well, and then pressing "Stop."
- Reading extremely quickly to get a lot of words recognized in a short time
1 Reading a short excerpt well, and then pressing "Stop."
Imagine a student reads 15 words in 10 seconds and then presses "stop." Their WPM score could be calculated as 90 (ie 90 words / 60 seconds).
This will be the case if the "Can Exit Early" setting is checked.
Under this confiuration the recording time is used in the WPM calculation. If you uncheck this box, then the time limit will be used in the calculation. So if the time limit was set to 60 seconds in the above example, the student who read 15 words would receive a WPM score of 15.
For this setting to be effective, the passage should be longer or close to what a good student can realistically read in the time limit.
The default audio recorder "Just Start" will still show a stop button, allowing the student to exit early, but the WPM calculation will use the timelimit. The other audio recorder "Mic-test then start" will not show a stop option.
2. Reading extremely quickly to get a lot of words recognized in a short time
Only correctly spoken words are counted for the WPM, but motormouthing will still yield a high number of correct words. If a student reads the passage extremely quickly, they can get a high WPM score. But they will almost certainly also receive a high error count. So the passage will be marked up with a lot of red.
To counter motor mouths, in the Grade Calculation setting choose:
"Strict (total correct words - errors) / per min / Target WPM
This will offset the benefits of motormouthing. Though it is likely they will still receive some benefit.