Recently, a grader transcribed a short, 10-second recording in this way (recording below):

At first glance, it might seem reasonable to score the recording this way, since the only word uttered in the recording is “bird.” However, it’s fairly unlikely that the student skipped 4 lines of text entirely, and it’s more feasible that the word “bird” is an insertion they made at the start of this excerpt. Grading the recording in this way resulted in the first 4 lines being counted as errors and significantly deflated the student’s score.

This is how we regraded the recording:

While it’s hard to know for certain without hearing the student read the ENTIRE passage, we ask that you use your best judgment when determining where to insert 1-2 word utterances in a short recording.

Summary: In short recordings, it is usually unlikely that a student would skip several lines of text to read just 1-2 words in the middle of the passage. More often than not, you would want to insert the utterances at the start of the passage.

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