<p>...I'm quoted.</p>
<p>"Last week, some 300,000 students who took the revamped SAT college entrance exam got their first look at the results. Among them were 107 who scored a perfect 2,400, including the highest score possible on the newly created writing test.</p>
<p>But if multiple choice is a black and white affair, writing the essay has opened the door to a much grayer world."</p>
<p>CAn you paste it all? I don't want to have to register for the NY times</p>
<p>Last week, some 300,000 students who took the revamped SAT college entrance exam got their first look at the results. Among them were 107 who scored a perfect 2,400, including the highest score possible on the newly created writing test.</p>
<p>But if multiple choice is a black and white affair, writing the essay has opened the door to a much grayer world.</p>
<p>Anya [last name removed], a 15-year-old sophomore at Washington International School in Washington, D.C., was among those who were troubled by the scoring for the essay.</p>
<p>"Writing has always been an interest of mine and something I did well in," said Anya, who scored a 9 out of a possible 12 on her essay. "I expected to get a higher score. I'm not really sure what to think about it."</p>
<p>With the new SAT, students can score a maximum of 800 in each category of reading, math and writing, with the score on the essay translating into 25 percent of the overall writing score, said Amy Schmidt, executive director of higher education research for the College Board. On Web sites, in high school hallways and in college guidance offices, students were trying to come to grips with the new writing component of the SAT - 49 multiple choice questions on grammar and usage and the essay. They looked for formulas for success, questioning whether longer essays or the use of literary references guaranteed a higher score.</p>
<p>"It's difficult to know how they graded the essay, since it's the only part of the test not done through a machine," Anya said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bias on the part of the grader, even though there are two readers."</p>
<p>The College Board will not provide detailed analysis of test results until the exam has been in use for a year. Educational consultants and guidance counselors have not received the results of the March test, making it difficult for them to draw any conclusions. But based on what students reported, the reaction is varied.</p>
<p>"I think confusion is the main buzz word right now," said Ryan Riggs, assistant director of college counseling at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville, Fla. "We have second-hand information from the kids saying, 'Oh, I did terrible' or 'I did great.' They're confused on how to interpret the scores. Our average, from what I've heard, is about 7 or 9."</p>
<p>Joan A. Bress, an educational consultant in Worcester, Mass., said: "For the most part, students have done rather well. The majority of my students have gotten at least a 9. I had a lot of students who have gotten 10's and 11's."</p>
<p>Ms. Bress added that she had just come back from 11 colleges in Maryland, where admissions officials said they were uncertain of how they would use the information. "They don't know what this is going to predict," she said.</p>
<p>"I think this is very much a work in progress right now," she said. "These kids are caught in a tough spot because this is a product which is still evolving. Students don't know what to expect, and colleges don't know how to use it."</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the College Board said it was pleased.</p>
<p>"We're feeling pretty upbeat," said Chiara Coletti, vice president for communications and public affairs. "Despite what some people feared, there were no essays that couldn't be read because of bad handwriting. And we read and scored all 300,000 essays in the 10 days immediately after the test, just as we had planned."</p>
<p>One problem did crop up, Ms. Coletti said. Some students wrote their essays in pen and the computers could not scan them. The essays were scored from paper.</p>
<p>"This was the test's maiden voyage, and we wanted to give the students an extra chance," she said.</p>
<p>As of Friday, two of Mr. Riggs's students at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville - Mycah [last name removed] and John [last name removed], both 17-year-old juniors - were still trying to glean what they could from their raw scores and by analyzing their approach.</p>
<p>Both had taken a prep course and thought they knew what to expect, but Mycah did much worse than she expected and John did better.</p>
<p>Mycah speculated that the 25-minute time limit for writing the essay had been her downfall. "I was off to a good start. It would have been really, really good if I had time to finish it," she said. "I probably got halfway through all the points I wanted to cover and stopped in midsentence. I was hoping they would give me the benefit of the doubt."</p>
<p>John said he went with a straight five-paragraph formula and tried not to be stressed. He received a nine. Mycah asked that her score not be used.</p>
<p>In meetings before the release of the scores, test developers went over some of the elements that they liked and disliked about essays that they had seen. They emphasized that length does not guarantee success and that big words used incorrectly would pull the scores down.</p>
<p>"I read really good papers that had only three paragraphs," said Kathleen Williams, vice president of test development at the College Board, noting that students who used the pat "five-paragraph essay" might find their results disappointing if they failed to tie their thoughts together.</p>
<p>Those who used varied sentence structure and were careful to support their point, she said, even if it was based solely on their own experience, were likely to have scored well.</p>
<p>Developers say much effort went into assuring that the scoring process was equitable. Scorers, for the most part English teachers, must hold a bachelor's degree or higher and have taught for at least three years. Readers went through 10 hours of online training, and their work was monitored as they scored essays on a computer.</p>
<p>Although Anya, who scored a 2,120 with no test preparation, had concerns about scoring, she said she still thought it was a good idea to include an essay on the SAT.</p>
<p>"Most of the test is something you can memorize strategies for or know what to expect," she said. "You can't fake good writing. If you can't write a complete sentence, that's going to show, and I think that's a good thing for colleges to know."</p>