I didn't really follow the Trustee Election, but I like that both Peter Robinson '79 and Todd Zywicki '88 are academics, and more importantly, writers. Robinson wrote the famous "Tear Down this Wall" speech, while Zywicki is an author and commentator on the popular blog "The Volokh Conspiracy." In light of the recent emphasis on the significance of writing, both on the Dartmouth campus and among the college admissions community, the ability to string sentences together well is increasingly important. However, if one were to try to write the way the College Board seems to like, the famous "tear down this wall line" would have been much longer and clunkier.
This past spring saw the unveiling of the "new" SAT I exam, with a writing section worth an additional 800 points. I'm sure this version caused relief at having escaped among much of Dartmouth's undergraduate population and much glee over at Kaplan and the Princeton Review. However, for the average high school student, the additional exam sections have the potential to increase the stress levels already associated with the exam. Not only does the new section lengthen the testing period -- and force the student to add yet another healthy snack to their test-taking ritual -- but it also increases the amount of material to study. This in turn means yet another part of the test to teach, further increasing the ability of more affluent students to enroll in costly test-prep classes. The expected growth of the test-prep classes thus defeats any attempts to compensate for the disadvantages faced by lower-income students who can't afford private tutors and expensive review books.
The centerpiece of this new segment is the 25-minute writing section that asks students to expound on a question of profound significance using whatever examples they can come up with. You may remember having to do this on the section's predecessor, the SAT II Writing test, or on AP exams. Or in that paper you wrote at 3 a.m. last week. Regardless, while the ability to produce a coherent essay in this scattershot way can be a valued skill later in life, it does not necessarily mean that you can write well.
Indeed, there is increasing evidence that the new writing section does not in fact measure how well a student writes, just how quickly and how creatively. An article published in the NY Times on May 4 reported that Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at MIT, found that there was a direct correlation between the length of the essays and the score. Factual errors were ignored for those who could spit out more than the requisite five paragraphs, and grammar fell by the wayside for those who could string together long sentences. And while such a grading system sounds fantastic to me, I can imagine that it is a graders' worst nightmare. But more importantly, the type of writing it encourages is not good. It urges students to sacrifice clarity for complexity and succinctness for superfluous language. It is a common complaint among students that in many works by academics in all fields, the ability to garner meaning is impeded by clunky sentences and overwritten passages. This problem will not improve if our current generation of scholars is trained in the same way. The writing section has not been fully phased in yet, however. The official statistic is that of 1,600 four-year colleges, only 429 have announced they will consider the writing score. Dartmouth's current policy is that, for applicants to the class of 2010, you have the option of taking the new SAT I and submitting two SAT II scores, or of submitting a score from the old SAT I and three SAT IIs, including a writing score. I assume that, like the rest of the Ivies, the new test will become standard. However, such a decision, while inevitable, seems antithetical to the increased emphasis on writing at Dartmouth. English 5 may become even more about re-teaching students how to write, especially if high schools start teaching to the test. Additionally, the time pressure of the 25-minute essay removes the opportunity to read over and edit one's work, which is an essential part of the writing process.
The institution of a writing section of the SAT I is a step forward in its recognition of the importance of improving the writing skills of American high school students. However, it is nothing more than a transfer of the SAT II writing exam to the SAT I. It is only a temporary solution in the fight to make the SAT I more indicative of aptitude, not income. Still, here at Dartmouth, at least we have English 5 and the First-Year Seminar program to counteract the influences of this new speed-writing exam. Hopefully such training will continue to produce alums who write well.
