The College Board promotes quality writing in theory. But in practice, its argument proves superficial.

Writing is a useful tool because it allows us a more objective view of our topic. This objectivity sustains our ability to draw connections, make conclusions, and articulately communicate what we've learned. By devaluing this analytic aspect of writing, the SAT Essay undermines the very skills that it promises to support.

why add an essay?

On February 8, 2001, the president of the University of California delivered a widely-publicized speech to the American Council on Education. In this speech, he proposed four criteria to be required of standardized tests used in college admissions:

The academic competencies to be tested should be clearly defined. There should be a demonstrable relationship between what is tested and what the student studied in high school. In other words, testing should be directly related to the required college preparatory curriculum.

Students from any comprehensive high school in California should be able to score well if they mastered the curriculum.

Students should be able to review their score and understand where they did well or fell short and what they must do to earn higher scores in the future.

Test scores should help admissions officers evaluate the applicant's readiness for college-level work (Atkinson, 2001 Robert H. Atwell Distinguished Lecture).

Because the SAT I did not meet these requirements, he asserted that "America's overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system" and recommended that the U.C. no longer require SAT scores for admission. Broadcast in Time magazine and other large media outlets, Atkinson's pronouncements put enormous pressure on the College Board to address these concerns or lose a chunk of its income. In June 2002, the College Board unveiled the 'new' SAT, one that promised to address Atkinson's requirements:

"The new SAT I will only improve the test's current strengths by placing the highest possible emphasis on the most important college success skills...The new test will be even more closely aligned with current high school curricula than before" (College Board, "College Board Announces a New SAT").

"The College Board made these changes to better reflect what students study in high school" (CB, "New SAT for the Press").

"In addition, a diagnostic feature, similar to one recently added to the PSAT/NMSQT®, will be added to the SAT I to provide diagnostic information to help improve a student's academic skills."

"Research has shown that the addition of a writing test provides increased validity in predicting college success, but, more importantly, it sends a loud and clear message that strong writing is essential to success in college and beyond" ("CB Announces").

This "loud and clear message" is more than figurative. By requiring certain courseloads and standardized tests, universitiy admissions policies exert incredible control over K-12 curriculum throughout the country. The SAT I needed to focus more on the high school material that best prepares students for college in order to maintain its relevance to higher education. As the most significant and touted distinction from the old SAT, the essay is emblematic of this new focus.

To test its new test, the College Board conducted a series of validity studies. This research concluded that the revised SAT does not substantially improve its validity for predicting college success or solve its lingering bias against women and minorities. These conclusions coincide with earlier research affirming that "writing assessments based on a single essay, even those read and scored twice, have extremely low reliability" in predicting college success. Then what does the new essay do?

a problem of implementation

The new SAT had two immediate and irrefutable impacts on students: it was now 45 minutes longer, and $12 more expensive. The College Board justified a 41% fee increase with the higher administrative costs of grading the new Writing section. Grading a subjective, student-written essay requires a rubric, and graders to apply that rubric. This grading process becomes more difficult on a scale as large as the SAT's, which over 2 million students take each year.

The scoring rubric presents a problematic aspects of grading millions of essays quickly and consistently. In his 2009 book MAKING THE GRADES: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZED TESTING INDUSTRY, Todd Farley chronicles his fifteen years in the for-profit testing industry. This damning account depicts the specious methods of testing companies (namely, ETS and Pearson) hired to score standardized tests. Such methods included hiring graders who had failed the qualifying tests and deliberately falsifying students' scores to manipulate reliability statistics. In Chapter 9, he describes a temp worker hired by Pearson who had distinguished herself by labeling an essay a 4, then a 3, then a 2, then a 1, then a 3 again (note: the grading scale was 1 to 3, and the correct grade was a 2). "Shipped off to another project before she could screw up too mightily" (Farley, 181), this grader was reassigned to score the first batch of SAT essays. Farley's 242-page book is full of such anecdotes, and reads like THE JUNGLE of the testing industry.

In this scoring environment, consistent application of the rubric seems far-fetched. The graders get 2-3 minutes to read each essay once and grade it. They can get trained online and work from home, implementing vague directions like "writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays". This insurmountable disconnect between the rubrics and the graders seems to eliminate the possibility of a uniform grading standard.

a problem of priority

Regardless of the pitfalls of standardizing a subjective essay, the rubric itself is troublesome as well. Dr. Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered a telling correlation between SAT essays' 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 in a New York Times article. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time." At the end of the interview, the reporter held up a sample essay far enough away that Dr. Perelman couldn't read the content. With just a glance at its size and shape, Dr. Perelman correctly labeled it a 4. This scene is eerily reminiscent of episodes from Farley's MAKING THE GRADES.

In April 2005, The National Council of Teachers of English (N.C.T.E.) issued a scathing report of the SAT's Writing Section. Noting how college requirements trickle down into K-12 instruction, the N.C.T.E. feared that "instead of practicing types of writing that take many forms, depending on audience, purpose, and context, students will likely practice one-draft persuasive writing responses using a pattern determined by the rubric" (8). In short, the "formulaic and superficial" (5) writing reinforced by the SAT would seep into all writing instruction.

From my own high school experience, I recall days spent in English class practicing the SAT II: Writing essay, which is the precursor to the current SAT essay. I was lucky to have that test broken down by a teacher as skilled as Mrs. Dunlap, who openly critiqued its format by highlighting how it differed from high school and college standards. But, even in Mrs. Dunlap's hands, training to write a perfect rough draft is still ridiculously wasteful. If the SAT II's formulaic standards hadn't seeped into my high school, my classtime would have focused more on close textual analysis or revision instead of test prep. This distinction between in-depth instruction and superficial test prep is substantial. For the student, prepping for a disposable SAT essay is inherently inferior to cultivating analytic writing skills that have value both in and outside the classroom.

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Strong Thesis, Weak Body: The SAT Essay

why add an essay?

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a problem of priority

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