Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test:
In the 1930's, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting "the only thing we need to fear is itself," which desdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success. In the end, the American economy pulled out of the depression and succeeded communism.
If that looks a little dubious to you, well, that's kind of the point. It's a deliberately bad essay produced by a student coached by Les Perelman at MIT, to demonstrate the flaws in the test and its grading.
Of course, you could've gotten the same basic information from the Blogger SAT Challenge, only without this fascinating side trip into American unhistory...
- Log in to post comments
Whaaaaat?
Let me echo coturnix's eloquent and accurate comment:
"Whaaaaat?"
How does this get a perfect score? Has the SAT "desdained" the rules of grammer?
Dang it! When I took the GRE, I had to write about whether scientific research with no foreseeable purpose was worth doing. Of course I said it was, and provided 3 or 4 true stories from a variety of fields showing different ways that seemingly useless inventions became extremely useful, even throwing in a bit about Dennis Gabor and the invention of holography. If I'd know that I could have given examples about J Edgar Hoover inventing the microwave . . .
Tolerably-written, if formulaic, misrepresentations of historical and current reality? Larry Kudlow, your hour has come!
Soviet economic hegemony crushed the US economy post-Black Tuesday?
"desdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success". Coca-Cola didn't build bottling plants at taxpayer expense throughout Europe as the Allied front advanced? The Marshall Plan did not render Europe a US economic vassal?
Diversity is a wonder. Everything other than objective truth is acceptable, compassionate, mandatory... heroic!
I don't see that the problem here is with the test itself - sure this essay demonstrates ignorance of American history, but why should a writing test care about that anyway? There are already tests for math, physics, history, geography and the like. Perhaps the essay topics ought to be things where facts don't matter. If not, I don't think we've demonstrated here a real problem with the grading of essays.
Of course in any essay you'd write in real life facts do matter, but that's not what this test should be about. It's like saying a physics professor shouldn't grade you down for getting subject-verb agreement wrong
I agree that the essay needn't be factually accurate if it's about writing skills. The argument against the success of formulaic writing is a stronger on, that should be separated from the argument about factual accuracy.
No one, aside from those in the harder disciplines, give a shit if what you say is complete baloney or not, as long as it's persuasively written. In which class do kids learn about logic and conceptual coherence -- geometry! English class is mostly about mastering rhetoric. The SAT Writing test simply reflects the reality of necessary writing skills in high school, college, and most of the real world, where style trumps substance. It's just a symptom, not a cause.
As an aside, note that most college admissions officials are completely ignoring the Writing test, as it is not highly g-loaded (that is, it doesn't demonstrate intelligence / reasoning skills), unlike the Verbal and Math sections.
I would disagree that an essay "needn't be factually accurate if it's about writing skills." At my university, our grading rubric addresses grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but most of the criteria revolve around -thinking- skills grounded in a reality-based world: e.g., "Writer explains and supports ideas in full, avoids logical fallacies, and examines alternate perspectives on the topic" and "The project accurately and astutely represents the ideas of the source with an awareness of the attitudes and intentions of the author, synthesizing them with the student's own ideas." For students to meet criteria such as these, there must be some substance to their writing, both in terms of facts and in terms of the logic that they bring to bear upon the facts. Unfortunately, students often arrive in our courses thinking that an 'error-free' essay--no mistakes in spelling, grammar, or punctuation--is an 'A' essay. They are shocked to discover that writing is about substance, and that good writing encompasses good thinking. For that, I blame the type of writing that schools are required to assign to prepare students for standardized tests. The assignments that my daughter does, for example, force her to focus on the mechanical aspects of writing instead of the substantive aspects. As a result, at the university the English professors have to do a lot of unteaching at the beginning of each year.
Franklin Delanor Roosevelt is my hero. So is Richard Klaxon.
Quoth D: "I don't see that the problem here is with the test itself - sure this essay demonstrates ignorance of American history, but why should a writing test care about that anyway? "
I might have more sympathy for that argument if the essay were, in fact, written in English. Instead, this looks like the sort of language used in corporate or government memos to obfuscate rather than communicate. It has more in common with Alan Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" than any meaningful writing. (Sokal, too, was intentionally writing nonsense in that paper.)
Given the time constraints, I can forgive one or two minor grammar or spelling mistakes. This example goes far beyond that. Coturnix's initial comment summarizes this essay succinctly.
You can download the whole essay at the link. The rest of it is at least as bad as this excerpt.
Since the grading is done by computer (a fact oddly not noted in the article), it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to game it. I, personally, am not surprised that essay got the highest score. It has the right words in the right order and it's long enough; I suspect that's all that's required to get a high score. A human, of course, would require a lot more.
Since the grading is done by computer (a fact oddly not noted in the article)
The essay is scored by two humans (and by a third if the first two disagree by more than 1 point, on a 6-point scale). The multiple-choice, which tests mostly grammar, is done by computer.
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/prep_one/essay/pracStar…