SAT not an accurate gauge of students' abilities? Gasp!
It seems the writing portion of the "new" SAT rewards verbosity over, you know, style, coherency, etc.
He [Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at MIT] 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.
Having read hundreds of undergrad papers this year, I can say that the quality of college freshman writing is generally not great. Hearing that ETS is watering it down even more, I shudder at the thought of having to read undergrad papers for the remainder of my working life.
He [Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at MIT] 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.
Having read hundreds of undergrad papers this year, I can say that the quality of college freshman writing is generally not great. Hearing that ETS is watering it down even more, I shudder at the thought of having to read undergrad papers for the remainder of my working life.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 22:29
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