SAT Essay Length vs. Score

<p>I received a 10 for about 1.5 pages. I was too slow in coming up with examples and couldn't add enough details. At least that's what I think kept me from a 12.</p>

<p>took it in March(the postponed ones) and filled it up completely.
Got a 9.</p>

<p>you almost need to fill up the whole thing to get a 12. if you write a concise essay, you still probably won't get more than a 10.</p>

<p>there's articles about this. the whole writing section is BS</p>

<p>I completely filled both pages and got a 7. I think it was a mistake though...</p>

<p>xgreen u may have had the only person who actually graded legit</p>

<p>pepgirly - what do you mean? Do you think most of the graders were going by length = high grade?</p>

<p>pepgirly14- No. If the graders differed in score by more than 1 a 3rd grader settles the dispute.</p>

<p>i didn't fill up the whole thing, I just did 1 and a half page, wrote a very simple 4 paragraph essay, used To Kill a Mockingbird and Martin Luther King and got a 12 in march.</p>

<p>Both pages, front and back, but with huuuuge handwriting. Four paragraphs total, got a 10.</p>

<p>hmph. there were great articles somewhere about the uncanny relationship between the length and the score of the SAT writing essay.<br>
more info:
<a href="http://blogs.mit.edu/madmatt/posts/12629.aspx%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://blogs.mit.edu/madmatt/posts/12629.aspx&lt;/a>
and more importantly
<a href="http://blogs.mit.edu/madmatt/posts/11771.aspx%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://blogs.mit.edu/madmatt/posts/11771.aspx&lt;/a>
^^reproduced below:</p>

<h1>from New York Times (apparenlty)</h1>

<pre><code>In March, Les Perelman attended a national college writing conference and sat in on a panel on the new SAT writing test. Dr. Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did doctoral work on testing and develops writing assessments for entering M.I.T. freshmen. He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test that started in March - and will be given for the second time on 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 said. A man on the panel from the College Board disagreed. "He told me I was jumping to conclusions," Dr. Perelman said. "Because M.I.T. is a place where everything is backed by data, I went to my hotel room, counted the words in those essays and put them in an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop." [...]

He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. "I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "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. [...]

In an interview, five top College Board officials strongly defended the writing test but sounded more muted about its usefulness. "The SAT essay should not be the primary way kids learn to write," said Wayne Camara, vice president for research. "It's one basic writing skill. If that's all the writing your high school English department is teaching, you have a problem."

They said that while there was a correlation between writing long and a high score, it was not as significant as Dr. Perelman stated. Graders also reward good short essays, they said, but the College Board erred by failing to release such samples to the public. "We will change that," said Chiara Coletti, a vice president.
</code></pre>

<p>Um before you post silly articles, I'd like to let you know that the professor only used public essays that were either in the blue book or posted on the website. Anyone who knows anything about statistics knows that there is automatic bias and that his results does not necessary reflect the whole population of people's essays, only the ones that were posted publicly.</p>

<p>Collegeboard has already created a rebuttal to this article on its website. I suggest you read it.</p>

<p>With that said, there is obviously a higher chance of getting a good score with a longer essay because you expanded your thought more. This does not mean that scoring is based on length, but length could be a resultant of a good essay.</p>

<p>Correlation does not mean causation.</p>

<p>Can you really condense 200 words into 50 words and still be as effective? I doubt it. That's what's going on here.</p>

<p>1 3/4 pgs...got an 11. I wonder if that 1/4 pg is what made that one person give me a 5. :-)</p>

<p>1.4 pages...11</p>

<p>March 1.75 pages....10
May 2 pages...........11</p>

<p>full two pages got an 11. one sentence coneclusion.</p>

<p>two full - sort of off topic - 10</p>

<p>1.5 pages with 1 sentence conclusion and one made up example abt a guy name John T. (was suppose to be John Q heh)</p>

<p>Got an 8</p>

<p>if someone got a 9 on the essay and 78 for the mc subscore, how much increase in score would he have achieved if he'd gotten a 10 instead on the essay? appreciate any responses thanks</p>

<p>Curious....what Was Your Writing Score? I Got A 7 And A 78 For A 720.</p>