behind the news

Obfuscate Your Way to The Top

May 4, 2005

Today’s New York Times has one of those stories you just knew everybody would be writing sooner or later: The much-dreaded new essay component of the SAT college entrance exam deserves a D-. The Times’ Michael Winerip explains why.

Winerip introduces us to Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argues the 25-minute essay — to be administered for the second time this Saturday — “is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits.”

“It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score,” Dr. Perelman told Winerip. When an official of the College Board, which devised the new test, disagreed, Perelman put the exam results into an Excel spreadsheet and crunched the data. Here’s what he found, according to Winerip:

“If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time.” The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.

Perelman isn’t alone in his view, writes Winerip.

A report released this week by the National Council of Teachers of English mirrors Dr. Perelman’s criticism of the new SAT essay. It cautions that a single, 25-minute writing test ignores the most basic lesson of writing — that good writing is rewriting. It warns that the SAT is pushing schools toward “formulaic” writing instruction.

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This is a far cry from all the hoopla when the new SAT was announced two years ago. College Board officials described it as a tool that could transform American education, forcing schools to better teach writing. A “great social experiment,” Time magazine said.

The inherent problems of devising and accurately grading an essay test administered to about 2.5 million college hopefuls each year should surprise no one, despite all the early hoopla. (“Cynics say the new essay is window dressing added to placate California officials who in 2001 were calling the old SAT outmoded and were threatening to stop requiring it,” Winerip reports.)

Long before the actual test was administered, The Atlantic published an essay by John Katzman, Andy Lutz and Erik Olson of the Princeton Review, which tutors SAT test-takers. Their article was titled “Would Shakespeare Get into Swarthmore: How several well-known writers (and the Unabomber) would fare on the new SAT.” Based on the College Board’s arcane essay grading system, they concluded: not well.

Their advice:

Whenever possible the student should use polysyllabic words where shorter, clearer words would suffice. The SAT essay will not be a place to take rhetorical chances. Flair will win no points; the highest-scoring essays will be earnest, long-winded, and predictable.

Sorry, Shakespeare, it looks like Pomona Junior College for you.

–Susan Q. Stranahan

Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.