English Language Arts: Audience & Purpose (TEKS.ELA.9-12.8.E.iii) Practice Test

Calls to abandon traditional, confidential peer review in the humanities often invoke a technocratic imaginary—metrics dashboards, post-publication scorekeeping, and algorithmic gatekeeping—without reckoning with the epistemic texture of interpretive work. Hermeneutic claims are rarely falsifiable in the narrow sense; they are adjudicated through historically situated judgment, methodological pluralism, and the capacity to inhabit competing frameworks with intellectual charity. Open reports and reviewer signatures, while salutary for transparency, may generate perverse incentives: performative rigor, reputational herding, and a chilling effect on junior scholars who dissent from canonical readings or dominant theories. What the humanities require is not a frictionless reputation economy but thicker accountability: slow, dialogic review that foregrounds argumentative architecture, evidentiary warrant, and the ethical stakes of interpretation. Editors should curate review panels for epistemic diversity, publish synthesizing editorials that map areas of agreement and principled disagreement, and weight reports not by h-index but by the quality of their reasons. Tenure and promotion committees, in turn, must recalibrate their reliance on bibliometrics toward qualitative dossiers that surface a scholar's interlocutors, risks taken, and contributions to live debates. Reform is needed—but it must respect the distinctive modes of knowledge-making that define humanistic inquiry.

Texas's recent reliability challenges underscore a design paradox within energy-only markets: scarcity pricing is necessary to elicit flexible capacity, yet episodic price spikes alone rarely finance winterization, firm fuel, or fast-ramping reserves at the scale probabilistic risk warrants. A pragmatic path centers on calibrated, performance-based mechanisms that preserve ERCOT's efficiency while addressing tail risk. First, expand aggregation pathways for demand response so that industrial load, data centers, and commercial buildings can reliably bid verifiable negawatts into ancillary services. Second, adopt seasonal accreditation that reflects capacity's conditional value—thermal units that can demonstrate cold-weather readiness and dual-fuel capability should clear higher credits than nominal nameplate suggests. Third, deploy transparent, nodal-level signaling for transmission constraints to coordinate storage siting with congestion relief, not just energy arbitrage. Each measure retains market discipline—pay for performance, not promises—while mitigating correlated failures. The empirical north star is not ideological purity but loss-of-load probability reduced at reasonable cost. This portfolio approach asks designers to privilege system outcomes over asset lobbying and to align incentives with verifiable resilience, not merely installed megawatts.