A West Side Elementary 4th grader was one of only 308 students in the state of Tennessee to score perfectly on the 2014-15 TCAP writing assessment.
Cady Digby, 9, is part of the 0.05 percent of students, out of 602,062 students, to earn this superb achievement.
“This is really exciting because before I finished, I thought I’d fail, but I made a perfect score,” said Digby.
She was prompted to compare and contrast animal adaptations and said she had a lot of practice in Ms. Courtney Mathena’s 3rd grade language arts class.
“Ms. Mathena taught us about organizing our thoughts, using vocabulary and that reading improves vocabulary,” said Digby.
Her current language arts teacher, Ms. Tammy Markland, said she is an excellent writer and the type of student a teacher loves to have.
“She puts a lot of herself into her writing,” said Markland. “She’s one of those children that can take you there and make you see exactly what she’s talking about.”
Digby believes that one thing that helps her is to summarize her thoughts after reading, and she reads often. She said her favorite author is J.K. Rowling, and she is currently reading the Harry Potter series.
Markland attested to this, saying she comes to class every morning and reads.
“Cady is very thoughtful and bright,” said Markland. “I’m not surprised at all that she scored perfectly. She’s very conscientious.”