New York, New York by Matt McGann '00
I’m in New York City now, staying in a hotel a stone’s throw from the New York Stock Exchange (maybe I’ll see fellow MIT alum and NYSE CEO John Thain ’77).
On the bus ride down, I was reading today’s New York Times, where there was an interesting column about the new SAT writing section.
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.
Hmm… it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I know that for many of you, these two next few weeks are filled with exams — APs and IBs have begun this week. Good luck!