There's a truism that in academia, one gets judged by the quantity, not the quality, of what one writes. If so, then the SAT has clearly been redesigned by academics. In the 25-minute essay section of the test -- where students read an essay and then write out answers -- the test-takers are, apparently, graded on length, not on content.

"It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score," Perelman said. A man on the panel from the College Board disagreed. "He told me I was jumping to conclusions," Perelman said. "Because MIT 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."

Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to schools nationwide to prepare students for the essay. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board website meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing "anchor" samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.

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. 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.

Publish by the pound, as they say. Regardless of whether it makes any sense.

He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the "firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862." (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James M. McPherson, it was "33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells.")
Perelman contacted the College Board and was surprised to learn that on the new SAT essay, students are not penalized for incorrect facts. The official guide for scorers explains: "Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays. For example, a writer may state "The American Revolution began in 1842" or " 'Anna Karenina,' a play by the French author Joseph Conrad, was a very upbeat literary work." (Actually, that's 1775; a novel by the Russian Leo Tolstoy, and poor Anna hurls herself under a train.) No matter. "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."

You are scoring the "writing," not the "correctness." So people who write more are, obviously, better writers. At least as reflected in their SAT scores.

A report released this week by the National Council of Teachers of English mirrors Perelman's criticism. It said a single, 25-minute writing test ignores the most basic lesson of writing -- that good writing is rewriting. It warns that the SAT is pushing schools toward "formulaic" writing instruction.

Actually, it's worse than that. It's pushing schools toward teaching kids that content doesn't matter, just length. Formulaic writing instruction can be fine -- the basic essay form is an excellent structure to hammer into kids, so that they can then learn when it's okay to break out of it. But simply pushing them to throw around a lot of dates and judgments and names and to do so in long sentences, long paragraphs, and long answers, regardless of what's actually being said, isn't what writing is about.

Except on the SAT.

(via Pharyngula)

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