SAT essay: length vs. score (a rant)

<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Consider the article. A professor from MIT has discovered a strong positive correlation between essay length and grade.</p>

<p>What are your rants/opinions about the sat essay?</p>

<p>To me the sat essay is pointless. Scratching something for 25 minutes can hardly be a good sample of your writing. At most, it reveals whether you suffer from writer's block and whether you can spew up to two pages of nonsense for 25 minutes in response to some random quotation. And of course the longer the better. The more you fill up the page with random examples, preferrably from literature, the more points you get even if you are vaguely familiar with the example.
Possibly the essay was added so that collegeboard and test-prep companies (barrons, pr, kaplan, etc) could offer new, more expensive books and courses. Not everyone who took the old sat had to take sat 2 writing but now everyone who takes the new sat has to write an essay. Hell, that's why taking the new sat costs more...</p>

<p>Have you seen the Washington post cartoon?
It says the same thing.
let me find the site
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinion/toles.html?name=Toles&date=20050505%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinion/toles.html?name=Toles&date=20050505&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I listened to that professor getting interviewed on NPR as I drove to the test site yesterday morning. I found it interesting, but I wasn't surprised at all.</p>

<p>I have no problem BSing 400 words for a high score, but it does irk me that the SAT now costs $12 more since they're obviously not spending much time gradiing them at all. I know it doesn't cost them $12 more/each to make up a prompt and spend three minutes grading it.</p>

<p>
[quote]
SAT graders are told to read an essay just once and spend two to three minutes per essay, and Dr. Perelman is now adept at rapid-fire SAT grading. This reporter held up a sample essay far enough away so it could not be read, and he was still able to guess the correct grade by its bulk and shape. "That's a 4," he said. "It looks like a 4."

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Ah, now I get it. The essay score is a fraction! 5 out of 6 means that you used roughly 5/6 of the total space =)</p>

<p>i honestly dont believe you can write nonsense and get a good grade</p>

<p>writing the full length is also about creativity and your ability to think of things out of nothing. is it a great way to test this? probably not. would you rather have to analyze 2 poems and a prose passage? i doubt it</p>

<p>Well of course, creativity counts. Recalling facts(even incorrectly) and remembering things out of nothing are not things everyone suceeds in. I wonder: could you make up books and authors on the sat essay?
It's even harder to write personal accounts, but they often not appreciated by the graders. If you can relate the quote to a personal experience and describe that in two pages - well done!</p>

<p>But what about the standard essay formula: Thesis+3 examples+conclusion. This leads to ridiculous essays and making stuff up. It is also disturbing that quantity takes precedence over quality. Sure the essay has to be on topic and to have good examples, but does that mean that it should take up all the space?</p>

<p>But hey, just be glad you know how to beat it now, eh?
It's not like you really thought a 25 minute essay and a few dozen MC editing questions were really going to demonstrate your writing abilities...</p>

<p>no. that length stuff is definitely not always true.</p>

<p>On the March SAT, I filled the first page and 3/4 of the next and I got a 12. I didn't have to use it all.</p>

<p>My friend, on the other hand, who always writes lengthy essays only got an 11. </p>

<p>If you know how to write, you should get a 12. Screw this length nonsense. </p>

<p>And another interesting fact, i read a Newsweek article published shortly after the March test which said that essays that went for the 4 paragraph approach did generally better than those with 5 paragraphs.</p>

<p>Personally, I went into the essay knowing that if I wrote furiously and was prosaic and verbose without really getting at anything then I would probably score decently. I got a 12 on the SAT and ACT writing. For the SAT writing, I refuted the prompt in that my thesis essentially said that I felt it was a fallacy to even make that statement (About creativity). I don't really think they cared. When I got my score, I had a friend read it, and he got just as good of a laugh out of it as I had writing it- not to say I enjoyed it, but I wanted to see if they were true to their word about "writing on topic." Its honestly ludicrous to test our writing, and I know that the top grade in my Honors English Class (Jr- we only offer AP Eng. Lang., and it's Sr-only) got a 7 on the SAT essay- but she is a most excellent writer, as I have read her papers on numerous occasions. Its a crapshoot- my best friend got a 9 and is an excellent writer; she presented complex analysis and on the spot illusions and analogies. But she didn't fill the pages. I did, on both the SAT and ACT. </p>

<p>Additionally, a similar editorial was in my local paper, Sacramento Bee. It's really ridiculous, even more so than with the writing-- I consistently score lowest on math (my ACT subscore was 32, whereas my composite was 34) and my SAT math on the new was 700. I'm not one to study- but I would probably say my Calc class is my favorite, I'm on a regional math team, and overall I math is, and always has been one of my best subjects. Yet consistenly, I test comparitively poorly. So, the test represents me? No-- on of my other good friends scores in a much lower percentile due in part to her upbringing at an "open school" where they encourage creativity and greatly limit testing. We are brought up to test- and without that "skill" being impounded in us, many of our brains would not be able to sit in a box that way. This girl is brilliant, really, and I have such faith she's going to do amazing so long as admissions people don't see her scores and think that all of the amazing things she does are a crock (10 or so college courses througout high school, summer tours with the ACLU, multiple internships at governors office, etc., JSA, girl's state selection)...Just my two cents...</p>