@Creekland I’ve heard of this for private middle/high schools, which I am sure produces some pretty hilarious results.
Sure. And California’s Community Colleges are an option as well. But when many families with high achieving kids make a college list, such schools are often off the radar, even if they shouldn’t be.
Better solution may be to require applicants to submit a graded HS paper. Unless the paper itself was a result of cheating, the school is assured that the essay comes from the applicant and provides some base line to compare the application essays. One of the Ivy interviewers in our neck of the woods asks his interviewees to to bring a graded writing sample.
This happens far more often than people think, unfortunately. I’m sure it would happen more if kids knew they were planning to use it for admissions later too.
I can just imagine what this would reveal, especially if the topics were NOT disclosed ahead of time, but were so general that no one could claim that the prompt was the problem. And I also can imagine that highly selective schools would still take those whom they wanted, for whatever reasons they want, even if the desired student was obviously unable to write, but had submitted a masterful admissions essay.
Hahaha. A NYC private school had this idea a while ago.
Parents had to hand write their paragraph on what their kid was like during the school interview.
A few nyc private schools also have proctored timed tests, in addition to asking for ISEE and SSAT scores.
Not that they’re ever going back to this, but didn’t colleges used to have their own entrance exams that you took in person, at the college?
When the standardized tests had an essay requirement, were the actual essays submitted to the colleges, or just the Essay “score?”
If the former, it would seem the colleges didn’t have much use for an extemporaneous writing sample.
The SAT writing section used to be a separate SAT II / Subject test. It was noticed by some colleges that it correlated better with college GPA than the SAT did. So after lobbying etc. it was moved into the SAT. But then test prep companies eventually reverse-engineered the grading rubric to teach their clients how to do well on it even if they did not write very well. Obviously, this made it less useful to colleges.
But was the actual writing sample provided to the schools, or just the score?
Yes, colleges received both.
Oxford/Cambridge still do. Not at the University, but approved test centers.
The BS my son attended does this! They prefer it to the SSAT. And they are not looking for brilliance or perfection…
Then it would seem that most colleges weren’t that interested in evaluating an extemporaneous essay.
One of my kids is a far better writer than I ever was.kids with superlative essays have letters or publications that back up that ability
Yes and no. My kids are all surprisingly good writers, but I don’t know if recommendations would have backed that up. Also, they all had minor mechanics issues that would have come out on an in-person essay. There were some minor punctuation issues that didn’t get straightened out until ACT prep time. OTOH, youngest’s school made kids read three related academic papers and write an analysis paper that was then graded, in order to place out of the lowest level of freshman comp. Everyone had to take a second level of freshman comp, even those who were published, award-winning writers.
I thought, if my kid, coming out of a public school where they hardly ever had to write anything (after all, what they wrote, an overworked teacher would have had to read and grade), received the highest rating on the analysis paper, then who have they admitted with such poor writing skills?
some of the essays sound like these kids have a future on the NYT best sellers list or being a key writer for the NYT at 17/18 and you have to wonder - how many of those kids are there??
Umm, well, actually, my kid was published in the NY Times while in high school. It does happen.
My D22 did the same and made sure I couldn’t directly edit them!
Approved test centers also include registered high schools (at least in the UK) so that it is not too inconvenient for the students. The different exams (for different courses/subjects) take place at the same time, which help to minimize disruptions.
The grading rubric for the writing section was absurd. My only kid who took the SAT with writing is a superb, gifted writer, and they got a horrible score on it, way out of range with their virtually perfect English score. It’s because they hadn’t been trained to write to the SAT grading rubric. What probably would have been better would have been for the essay produced during the exam in response to the prompt to have been simply submitted to the college, and let the college deal with it.