Slashdot Mirror
Bloggers or High Schoolers, Where is the Literary Talent?
word munger writes "A few weeks ago, Chad Orzel read a New York Times article which analyzed the best high school writing on the new SAT test. The Times' writer appeared surprised that the best high school writing was so bad. Chad then wondered if the best bloggers could do any better under the same conditions and it was put to the test. Over 500 people tried the timed online test, but just 109 scoreable responses resulted. Professionals graded all the responses which were then posted on a web site where readers can rate the essays themselves, as well as find out the professional score. So who's a better writer, a blogger or a high schooler? You can also read Chad's analysis — or better yet, you can decide for yourself."
Who's a better blogger, CowboyNeal or your average New York Times reporter?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Bloggers are experts at writing
take Slashdot for example
okay, what about high schoolers that are bloggers? Technically they ruin the test because it's no longer a 1:1 comparison. Plus, it's not really fair unless you test high schoolers from everywhere in the US. One of my teachers pointed out one time that certain parts of the country are better and worse at different subjects. And then there's the whole who cares about grammar as long as you accurately get the point accross thing.
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
Just hazarding a guess, but I think one of these groups might have a class or two which covers essay writing for things such as the SAT, and a hint is that it's not the Bloggers.
For alot of Bloggers, High School (much less College) was quite a long time ago, and most employers aren't quite as pedantic as English Teachers are.
On a related note, on our 'Advanced English Comp' exam that all Juniors have to take at our College you get to make 3 mistakes or you have to take the English Comp course. No, I dont mean 3 major mistakes, I mean anything wrong gets counted against you. For example in this writeup alone, I'm sure I have more then 3 mistakes with comma usage alone, much less any of the other writing conventions.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I took the SAT in March '05. The essay portion then (assuming it hasn't been changed) is 25 minutes. Even the blog entries I (rarely) write take much longer than that to get a coherent thought properly written - and those take less thinking, usually, than the SAT essay prompt.
In Florida we have (or had, it's been a while) a law called the Gordon Rule. It requires that each student must write a minimum number of words in order to graduate from high school. Though I don't agree much with the quantity required, I think it's a good idea. For me it has always seemed odd that people will practice tennis, math, guitar in order to be proficient but will not do the same thing for writing. For many students the argument is, "I know how to speak English. All I need to do is write it down." Do bloggers write better than non-bloggers? I don't know... but at least it gives some practice in using words.
This is stupid on the face of it. Is the best writing produced in a timed setting from a random prompt?
Come on. Good writing isn't produced like this, and it's not reasonable for the population of a single SAT trial to produce good writing. # of SAT writers infinite monkeys, and SAT examination time infinite. So big deal.
There are lives at stake here!
Perhaps one paraphers don't cut, when experience required in writing introduction conclusion and ability to maintain flow over entire page or five.
That is a very odd comparison, to say the least. The 2 groups are different in too many ways. The testing styles are too different in too many ways. The requirements were different as well. Testing conditions were different. Etc. Hardly scientific. But, it does make great press, right? Odd that so many Slashdot stories moan about science vs. , but then they go with a weird story like this where a "study" is presented as science just because the authors used sort-of scientific "talk" to present their "findings." Isn't this the type of story that 20/20 or Dateline makes up to get viewers?
As a writer (yes, you can't tell from my slashdot writing, which proves my point...), one needs limitations when one writes. For example, what reading level shoudl I write to, who is the audience, what is the audience comprehension level, and what style or genre would you prefer for my text. The instructions for both tests give very little of this information. I would find it impossible to write to my audience here... the exam graders/judges.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
There seems to be a belief that the first draft of anything should be perfect.
You have an essay to write on a test? no problem, it should look like the finely crafted masterpiece someone else wrote over a period of days, months, or even years. And you have 10 minutes to do it.
People should be introduced to the first draft manuscript of any literature, I think they would be surprised at how awful much of it is.
i wuz up all nite wrkn on my essay to pub 2 my blog when i rlzed that it wudnt b reel w/o sum form of sweet lingo dun up in da house 2 sho 2 my othr HS students, so i only got a 2 outta 6 on dat essay when i got a 9/12 on my SAT 1
Well, I always can count on finding it in the Slashdot comments...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wht? Y R U Sying tht plp on teh net kant type?
That's unpossible!
Can't --- breathe --- drowing in --- links --- can't --- figure out --- what to --- click!!
But really, I can't believe people are complaining about "first drafts" when
1) they're being compared to high school kids. So first draft or final manuscript, high school graduates should out-write high schoolers, especially if they spend a good deal of their time writing
and
2) you should be able to put together a well-written essay that short in 25 minutes.
In any case, this has only increased my hatred for the "blogosphere". They're just a bunch of people writing unstructured rants and occasionally finding bits of novel information, and this is the new journalistic revolution? Oh, I think the idea of blogging is wonderful, but the community itself makes me sick. And then there's that awful name...
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The damn test gives 25 minutes to write a coherent well-thought out essay. Samuel Johnson wouldn't have been able to bang out a readable essay in twenty-five freaking minutes. Nabokov would have taken one look at the time limit, laughed, and then walked out. 25 minutes, holy crap. Are the people who come up with these tests insane?
For more on the reliability of SAT essay questions as a measure of anything except the ability to pile on verbage, here's an excerpt from another NYT article that ran last year:
"In March, Les Perelman attended a national college writing conference and sat in on a panel on the new SAT writing test. Dr. Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did doctoral work on testing and develops writing assessments for entering M.I.T. freshmen. He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test that started in March - and will be given for the second time on Saturday - is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits...
In the next weeks, Dr. 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 high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site 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. '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."
So to any high schoolers about to take the SAT: when in doubt, write a lot, in third-person, and in cursive.
The reporter .. maybe .. for now. People want things said in sound bites, and in an entertaining manner. Hopefully it will make them feel good about themselves while blaming someone/something else for their inconvenience.
.. without bothering to udnerstand the whole situation.
..dumb down .. reduce verbiage .. and utilize deprecative humor against something (anything ..a straw man?). But if you want to appeal to long term common sense and to the humane and just thinkers .. well then be articulate, open minded, and well researched in your writings.
If someone writes a long winded treatise on a topic, most people will ignore, and even be annoyed by it. Even worse, they will go for an easy to understand, though inaccurate, criticism of it
So yeah, if you want to be popular
Will someone please tell me what the infatuation with standardized testing is about?
You get to rank kids, but you also get kids that have trained for the test. I have two sisters that are teachers that quite specifically teach to the test-du-jour. I mean not just a couple of weeks, but every single day's learning plan is oriented around the test the kids take that year.
So, we've got kids being trained for a test, which is certainly not an "education." Or maybe that's what passes for an education for the unwashed, shrinking middle-class masses in America?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This should not surprise anybody, for the following reasons:
1) The SAT writing section gives a student only the opportunity to write a first draft.
2) The SAT writing section is almost always on an incredibly boring and uninspired topic, because the subject of the essay must be as equally accessible to all test-takers as possible. It's also quite obvious that it is hard to write well on a subject you could not care less about. The intersection of good writers and those interested in the topic has to be miniscule, if nonexistant.
3) The SAT writing section is graded based on grammatical correctness and the logical ordering of ideas. It takes no account of whether those ideas make canonical sense, only that they were ordered in a consistent and logical manner.
The SAT writing section can not gauge anything besides one's ability to write in the style of the MLA.
It's been said a million times, but I'll say it again: The SAT score only measures one's ability to take the SAT.
Disclosure: I am a recent college grad who did very well on the SATs.
At least bloggers are bothering to write. If blogging is what it takes to encourage literacy, fine. Mind you, just because you do something a lot, it doesn't mean that you actually get better. You actually have to try to get better. Feedback is important because it enables you to know if you're getting better. Do bloggers get feedback? It depends. One kind of feedback is the response you get to your posts. Over time a lack of response is discouraging. The blogger will either try to get better or give up. It's kind of like the moderation system on Slashdot. Slashdot has, it seems to me, fewer vile posts than many other blogs. The people who write nasty stuff tend to get discouraged and either go away or reform.
So, does blogging produce better writers? It's quite possible.
OTOH, in the real world, we seldom have to develop a formulaic arbitrary piece of writing on a topic that we might not only have no interest in, but no background in. That is a good thing because writing about what you know nothing of, and have no interest in, makes you a hack. Certainly no one going off to college is hoping to be a hack.
A while back an english teacher got a hold of one of my writing and proceeded to 'correct it'. The teacher found several errors on the page, some I didn't realize I made, some that did not change the meaning, some that were bad. Understand I feel like I know who to write, and I feel like I know English. I know to say 'on which side the bread is buttered'. I know that saying 'to boldly go' is wrong, but the correct structure changes the meaning. I understand that as a teacher of English one must be pedantic, but expecting a writer to produce a good product in 25 minutes, on a random subject, is just idiocy. Such a requirement is an insult to the adult process of writing, in which one starts off with an interesting idea, and develops it over time.
Many years ago Byte magazine had a silly essay comparing quality the writings of Hemmingway to the quality of a computer program. Even at the young age I read this, I understood that the analogy was daft, as a computer program must be perfect, and reflects a technical process that changes over time, while a published creative work of fiction is a snapshot of a creative process. The later need not conform to some arbitrary standard of perfection to be a perfectly wonderful tale.
In the end this is one of those studies by one of those people that believes a good SAT score has some bearing on your actual ability to produce a real product, creative, technical, or otherwise. This is not sour grapes. I have always had very respectable standardized test scores, scores in fact that probably overestimate my ability. OTOH my ability to produce has nothing to do with the test scores.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
--Robert Louis Stevenson
These essays seem to be running about 250 words... about a page.
Jack London was proud of himself for turning out 1000 words every day. George Bernard Shaw set his stint at five pages a day.
And of course a professional writer has been preparing to write those words and thinking about them well in advance. And they are on a topic that the writer has selected him- or herself, and has some knowledge of.
So they hit a _high school student_ cold with a topic the student has never seen before and give him or her twenty-five minutes (how on earth did they come up with that figure? Why not a round half-hour, at least?) to do, unprepared, what takes a professional writer a couple of hours, prepared... and people are surprised at the results?
This isn't a test of writing in any meaningful sense of the word. I don't know what it's testing, but it isn't writing.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In the U.S. educational system there is currently a very strong bias towards math. Since math skills are so essential, school systems are willing to overlook problems with reading and writing as long as a student is progressing well in algebra, calculus, geometry, etc. The reverse never seems to be the case, however. A student proficient in math who has trouble reading and writing is "gifted", while a student proficient in reading and writing who struggles through math lessons is "special".
One will get you a pass, so-to-speak, and another limits your academic horizons significantly.
Having problems in either subject will likely result in problems down the line in higher education and the Real World, but a complete lack of verbal and written skills is often not enough to force educators to pay closer attention.
The question the students were asked to respond to (in the sample essays) was "Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?" With a question like that, how could you expect much more than rambling idea/word association? I mean, without memory, there is no learning.
Of course the students' essays were horribly written. The prompt was terrible:
Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?
That is an incredibly difficult question that philosophers could spend a lifetime thinking about. In fact, I've found that many philosophers addressing these difficult issues often have glaring logical holes, unfounded assumptions, and most strikingly, atrocious writing.
For some reason, the SAT believes that ambiguous, poorly crafted prompts somehow judge a student's writing abilities. If they want to judge a student's writing skills, this would be a much better prompt:
Your friend is contemplating cheating on the SAT. Write a letter to dissuade him/her from doing so.
At least there are concrete and fairly obvious reasons here, and I wager that you'd very quickly be able to see which students can write well and which can barely craft coherent sentences.
I had taken both versions of the SAT, being the old one and the changed version. It changed during my Junior year of High School. Really, all the SAT writing is good for is seeing if you can write something in response to a prompt in twenty-five minutes. It is one scenario of one kind of writing. The SAT would have implied that my writing was quite poor. The Advanced Placement Test said the opposite. There is a reason that most uniersities require you to write essays as a part of the application, it is because the new SAT is really not that good.
The fact that the whole thing is timed kinda hurts the challenge, I think. I'd like to consider myself a pretty good writer, but I'm terrible with a time limit. In high school I used to get all As in English class, but when it came to the essay exam at the end (administered by the State of New York), I'd get a B+ at best. That's because I don't work well with a time limit measured in hours or minutes. Give me a day or two to work and I'm fine. I like to move things around, nitpick over word choices, and play with sentence structure; and you can't really do that with a timer ticking in the background.
I'm laughing at the responses here because they reflect the thing that this little exercise showed - people online aren't responding to what was actually done, but to something they want to see. Orzel saw a NYT writer complaining about how bad the SAT essays were and basically said, they aren't that bad - you try to write something in 20 minutes online, cold, and it will be just as bad. And he and Cognitive Daily showed exactly this.
He certainly didn't tell us when I had him a few years back (And Chad, if you're reading this, (1) You still owe me and Matt a round of beers and a game of beer pong, and (2), Now do you know why talking like a pirate came so easily to most of the class?). Anyway, while its interesting that he's taken the time to raise this point, stating that bloggers are dumber than high school kids is like stating third graders have difficulty with lorentz transformations. Not to mention the fact that a good deal of the time, high schoolers (and middle schoolers!) are bloggers.
If everyone is under the same restriction, then it's a fine test. Sure, you're not going to get the most well-developed stuff, but it's good enough for a comparison.
It's true that interesting writing needs a bit more cooking, but you should be able to write coherently, succinctly and properly "in a timed setting from a random prompt." If you cannot do this, then you are not a talented writer. The test is looking for ability. Yes, given enough time and struggling a bad writer can eventually squeeze out something passable, but that's not the point of the study.
Most bloggers write like shit all the time, and that's without a time limit or an imposed topic. It doesn't take a rigorous study to see that.
Weren't the bloggers typing while the school students were writing with a pen? That would make for a big difference in speed/volume of information given as essay answer. Let alone the ability to cross out versus the ability to cut and paste text (and loose valuable information which if crossed out, at least helps us poor markers know what the student was thinking and mark on neatness too).
Having marked stuff myself, yes typed stuff is easier to mark, but it doesn't give as much information on whether the student is able to understand the question as handwritten stuff does. And the point of essays is to see if students understand the question, and can converse on it.
I disagree with this comparison completely. At least how it's being judged and what it's being called. I think the real question here is,
"who is better at critical thinking?" The bloggers, or high school kids with little life experience under their belt?
To say this is a test of writing, is just sick. Writing requires passion, inspiration, and thought. After visiting the site and seeing what exactly the question/comment that the "contestants" were required to write about, I didn't even want to bother looking at any of the submissions.
Another big difference, is that the SAT test takers are under pressure to perform for their educational future, whereas the "bloggers" don't really have anything riding on it.
I like to fancy myself a writer, but I know i'm not consistant with it. I really only write when I'm inspired to do so, and usually it's to vent whatever crappy experience I'm going through or as a release valve to the craziness that goes on in my head from time to time.
That's a far cry from asking my opinion in regards to a certain subject, then timing me as to how fast I can composite an opinion and express it in writing.
If this were to be an accurate accounting of flat out writing skill and the use of the english language, a better test would be to have the "contestants" write out a technical manual, and judge it on who could clearly and best explain how to setup your widget du jour.
Directions: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
'I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.'
-- Booker T. Washington
Assignment: What is your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
The quote was not about accomplishment, it was about position. Those words have different meanings.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Particularly devastating was their carriage return invention three years later. In between, the IBM Selectric introduced the "golf ball" electric type. The writer was taken out of the process by making things too easy!
So in just four short years that shook the literary world, the unfortunate Class of '61 saw the demise of pushing down manual keys, that pushed manual bars up, with a manual level you pushed to advanced lines.
Basically the bloggers just accused the testers of being in league with the communists. They made a few jokes about Bill Clinton and interns. Then they drew a picture of a cat.
So...what do I win??
A wise man once said nothing and simply listened.
Not in a box,
not with a fox,
No here not there
Not anywhere.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I tried, but he kept wanting to know what I was wearing and what my penis size was.
This "study" is based on the assumption that the people grading the essays have any clue what good writing is. After all, Tom Clancy and Stephen King are very rich men, even though I believe they are sucky writers. If I can't agree with millions of people around the globe, why would I agree with the results from a few "professors" in this study?
Bloggers are better than high schoolers, because when they write, they're doing it with passion. When you're taking a test, you aren't as passionate.
My problem with this test is that it is timed. While most writers do work under time constraints their working conditions are hardly "You have 1 hour to write about x topic, begin now."
Indeed it should not be expected that young, highschool age writers would be able to truely write well. Truely good writing requires both practice and expiriance. It also requires revision. Lots and lots of revision which most of these tests don't provide time for.
The essay portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test does not measure Scholastic Aptitude. According to the College Board, students are given 25 minutes to digest a question, consider its ramifications, develop an opinion, prepare a response, and write it coherently, in a well-organized and persuasive fashion. The shortness of the test, therefore, encourages the test-taker to, respectively: misconstrue questions and jump to conclusions, consider issues only at the most shallow and superficial level, form opinions hastily, forego careful argument construction, and avoid correcting mistakes in grammar and diction in order to get everything down on paper. It's hard for me to believe that this test provides any useful metrics on critical thinking at all.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
At no point before or during the SAT do they ever really tell you how your essay is supposed to be written. You are merely given a topic, "Is the will of the majority right?", and told to write an essay on it. Then they grade them. How, exactly do they grade them? I've read SAT prep books, I've taken it several times, I've taken independent essays. I still have no idea what parts of my essays are taken as well-written and what isn't. A large part of the result is based on how the student approached writing the essay. Also, having read some of the essays that they graded 12 versus those graded less, I haven't the most confidence in their graders. You take an essays scribbled in 25 minutes (on...was it two or three sides of paper with widely spaced lines--I ran out of space on every essay I wrote) and then hand them to two graders who got very little training and are expected to blaze through them as fast as possible. Is there little else they can do other than give higher scores to longer essays? Once you get to your fiftieth paper of the day on one of those mind-numbing topics, it's a miracle the essay gets read at all.
You have 25 minutes to write an essay on [random prompt].
Did I mention that this will decide your future?
Go.
I'm sure stress has nothing to do with it.
The terrible writing can easily be overcome. Just look at these reeel smarte kidz from the posh school in Manatee County, FL.e ?AID=/20060909/NEWS/609090372/
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl
For a group of top Manatee County students, however, the line between Internet research and outright plagiarism has been blurred, and perhaps crossed.
So much for figuring out how to write bedder.
NoMorePoints.com
I am not a phenomenal writer but I'm sure that I'd be much worse if it weren't for years of writing essays. Bloggers can spew out the same load of crud over and over without improving because they don't have a teacher to review their writing and make suggestions. It's very difficult to look at your own work and see how it can be improved. That's why even professional writers recieve help from editors.
What a surprise, most blogs aren't "well-written" I also don't read most blogs. Coincidence? No.
Of course the definition of "well-written" for an English teacher includes writing that most people don't like and excludes some very enjoyable writing.
For that matter, it's no surprise that neither students nor bloggers are very good at writing about something they neither care about, have good information, have the amout of time they'd like, nor the conditions they'd like. I doubt there's a single formal SAT session conducted at 2AM after a few glasses of wine.
So who's a better writer, a blogger or a high schooler?
Yes, the world really is only black and white. And Slashdot is your kind of place!
The essay portion of the SAT is a game. It takes very little talent, and there isn't much room for creativity when the essays are scored based on how well they conform to the "standard" 5 paragraph essay format.
Something like a full Kaplan course will get you an exta 30-40 points on an SAT. Beyond that, the returns rapidly diminish. All the studying in the world won't net you 100.
The primary alternative to test scores are grades, which are even worse. They are extremely coachable, greatly influenced by third parties (parents, tutors, smart friends), subject to teacher ass-kissing, and are often a measure of attention to detail and willingness to do the grind rather than mastery of the material.
Try taking the California Bar Exam.
..was my AP English class in a nutshell.. ;)
SYS 64738
The rest were probably dupes.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I'm very good at stream of consciousness writing, and incredibly bad at organizing my thoughts. Most people do overviews, then their essay. I do my essay, then an overview, then maybe rearrange large chunks.
When writing on my own -- things like fiction -- I typically don't do second drafts. I'll write a chapter through once, revising as I go (a few words or a sentence at a time), and it's usually good enough. From here on, if it's important and I feel like spending the time, I'll run back over it and revise a sentence here, rearrange a paragraph there, but after that, I pretty much leave it alone. It's not that I think my writing's set in stone, but simply that I'm not going to improve it at all from that initial sprint -- in fact, the more I mess with it, the more likely I am to screw it up.
The only time it will take me longer is if there is also a space constraint. While I can write concisely, I also have a tendancy to ramble. Probably the most difficult thing for me to do is elaborate on the very simple, almost proverb-like idea I have, without running on forever. The trick here is to figure out which things are important to talk about, which things to cut, which things to squeeze a few more words out of to get me under that 500 word limit (or whatever).
Still, give me an essay question and an unlimited amount of paper, and I will write literally nonstop (I'm used to typing), until I hear time is almost up, and then I will continue to write nonstop, but I'll be writing a conclusion.
Given the right conclusion, even the most random stream-of-consciousness crap can seem like a proper essay, especially if it reinforces something I was trying to say in the first place, such as: My stream-of-consciousness skills kick ass, and I fear no SAT essay questions. Too bad I don't care about the SAT anymore.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm a blogger as well as a high school student. I'm actually one of the top Englisah students at my school, and I believe it to be because I blog. Blogging allows for an increase in vocabulary and variations in writing styles. School just makes you organize it all. But I still only got a 10/12 on the SAT essay portion.
The Reader. Today's average reader is leagues below just twenty years ago, let alone one hundreds years prior. As has been mentioned, people do not consume the varied literature of their parent's generation and grandparent's generation. It It iss a verifiable fact.
Well-written essays on any subject matter threaten today's consumer. Reality Television is one example of the lack of concern people have for content and context.
"Reading the article, it seems like the primary problem is that the bloggers tended to not follow directions and wrote about whatever they actually felt like, instead of what they were supposed to write about."
Some of them move on and become slashdot moderators.
I still enjoy this argument: "I would have done better, but I prefer to do things well."
Standardized tests will never be able to adequately measure and rank each of us as we feel we surely deserve, and those that feel burdened by the exam will of course blame the exam. I've seen variations on this "study" where the Unabomber's manifesto would rank higher than Shakespeare, and the infamous rejection letter collections of famous, now-published authors motivate plenty of would-be writers. Standardized tests can only measure things to which there is an objective standard. Would you rather the SAT was a subjective exam and when asked to write about Columbus, you find yourself penalized because the grader doesn't like the fact that you devoted it to his sexual conquests? Or would you rather the SAT be entirely freeform and the grader gives you zero points because your decidedly brilliant ee cummings-esque poem soared beyond their meager attentions?
I don't have a problem wtih the people who say "oh, you see the SAT measures grammar and speed, so because I take a little longer than most people to write stuff, it doesn't matter that in the end, my stuff may or may not be better." At least they recognize what the test measures and that they will measure low.
The ones that do get on my nerves however, are the ones that seem to think they are above all else greatness embodied in the form of a high school essay writer. For full disclosure, I was probably one of those kids back when I was in high school. The ONLY reason they didn't do better is because they like to do great work and whatever their classmates put out following the objective standards used to measure sucess on the exam absolutely MUST be inferior quality to what they could do.
These kids almost always ignore the fact that, while yes, if they had an extra 20 minutes to write their essay it might be that much better, but that it's just as likely that their classmate's work will be better as well. Then their argument is "oh, but I don't work well within a timeframe." Fine, give the two kids unlimited time to do their work and while yours may be "technically perfect" theirs might be JUST as technically perfect but maybe it's a little bit more organized, or maybe they used the extra time to correct a critical flaw in the piece's logic.
This guy's argument is that because it takes him longer to do things, everyone else must be cutting corners and it'll "bite them in the ass" as it will most certainly do to the business world time and again (although I wonder how much knowledge this guy actually HAS of the business world and how much is just perpetuating stereotypes. For further disclosure, I'm assuming this is written by someone for whom the SAT is a fairly recent memory but I may be wrong. I clicked his link but just got a blank directory so no insight there.) It's equally likely that his/her classmates are NOT cutting so many corners to put out a basic SAT essay, or that they're NOT just regurgitating crap, that they have written something as insightful as his/her work and that they are just better writers.
It's ridiculously common to just decide that everyone, both those more and less successful than you, are in some way inferior. When they are more successful, it's because of "unfair" limits that they were better operating within, or because they took shortcuts or that the "wrong" things are being judged. If they are less successful, then it's proof of their inferiority and that the shortcuts have bit them in the ass.
"I've found that it's better to take time to plan and do things well" indicates that the two (taking less time and doing things well) are mutually exclusive when the test is designed to see who can do BOTH. It measures who did the best in the least amount of time. Your technically perfect yet unfinished because of time constraints essay will most likely score just as high as the technically imperfect yet completed within time constraints essay. It's the one that does both well that gets the higher points.
Or the proverbial cat who sits on a hot stove once and then will never sit on a cold stove?
Blame the test developers for asking a nonsensical question, not for asking a trivial one. It is only the proper or improper *use* of memories that helps or hinders learning from experience.
If you want to write prose that people can use, check out Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.
This is the book that Strunk&White(*) pretends to be. It teaches high-level organization and low-level syntactic clarity with vivid examples from real life. You get to see stepwise refactoring of unreadable bafflegab into clear and even persuasive prose.
To learn about tactical pitfalls while getting a good chuckle, read Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
If nothing else, remember the first rule of writing: know your audience and write for them. For example, I only said "stepwise refactoring" above because I'm writing for Slashdot.
(*)Endlessly repeating "Omit needless words!" and adding a few grammar rules does not help. It's also hypocritical, because if you think about it carefully you realize that "Omit needless words" is much longer than it needs to be.
I thought that most bloggers were high schoolers? Don't believe me, check out livejournal. The literary talent is so good, it's slashing. But don't fall into despair, there's always some hope.
I'll get my coat...
The big problem with this is that the SAT is not meant to be an example of a student's writing par excellence, but rather, given a difficult topic and a limited time, what can be produced. It's more of an analysis of the thought process and one's writing without the extra time allocated for editing and general "cleaning up" -- you're going to do well as long as you can make a convincing argument that is developed enough to actually stand on its own. It doesn't have to be perfect.
What does worry me is that, in 25 minutes, most bloggers could barely pull a coherent basis for an essay out of their ass. A 3?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/comment ary/la-op-sat3apr03,1,3742834.story
"There's a trick to this. The three bottom scores were easy to assign. A "1" was little more than a dribble of ungrammatical English, and a "2" was hardly more than that. A "3" was a well-meaning attempt to cobble three paragraphs together.
A "3" is the top rung of the bottom. If someone who writes daily online can't do better than "cobbling", regardless of the time limit, that really makes me wonder: given the time to develop, how would these essays have turned out? Maybe it's that a lot of bloggers are one-trick ponies and that the reason someone can write about some obscure subject each day is something akin to a suggestion.
The law only requires that a certain number of words are written for each of several classes. My humanities professor did not like the law, so to get around it she had us turn in our notes. You had to have 3000 words written per semester in humanities, you didn't have to take world class notes to get up to 3000 words in one semester. I loved that professor so much i re-arranged my schedule so that i could take her for humanities 2.
Anyhow the point was that it's not the law that makes teachers give out writing assignments it's the fact that they want you to write.
I think you underestimate the seriousness of the illiteracy problem in north america.
Some friends of mine are taking adult degrees at a local university. One of them is taking what was supposed to be a writing course, to help brush up on her essay skills.
It's a course on grammar and sentence structure. Material that was covered in Grades 9-12 when I was in high school.
I've met people with doctorates (PhD's), masters, and purportedly advanced (4 year) university degrees who simply cannot write. They can't express themselves. They can't explain an idea in anything other than the symbology of their degree.
I'd even go so far as to say that many of the purportedly educated people I've worked with simply can't communicate effectively, whether in verbal or written form.
I'm not sure who is to blame for the mess. Some blame sports and the idea of a coach pushing a prof to grant a passing grade to protect a star player, but the reality is none of the people I'm talking about were on athletic scholarships in the first place.
Even worse: most of them were not immigrants. They're second or third generation Canadians and Americans.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I cannot comment on the new SAT. I took it nearly a decade ago.
I can, however comment on the GRE (graduate record exam; like the SAT, but for graduate school admissions), which I took for laughs last fall.
It is my understanding that the new writing portions of the SAT are graded similarly to the written portions of the SAT. Indeed, it is unlikely that any significant portion of the population is able to write The Perfect essay in 25 minutes; especially on a subject not of their choosing.
I am of the belief that a vast majority of my peers, being 20- and 30-somethings, are unable perform adequately in written English. I am not speaking strictly to grammar, punctuation and spelling. In fact, when reading a well-crafted and logical statement, I am all but entirely willing to ignore most syntax and punctuation errors. The problem lies in the fact that every day I am confronted with emails, letters, Web pages, memos and other documents that are not only entirely devoid of technically correct English, but also of coherent thought and logical arguments.
Back to the GRE (and my suppositions about the new SAT). I knew basically nothing about the prompt on which I was asked to expound. I DID know that the GRE graders wouldn't really be looking at what I said, but how I said it. I came up with a logical outline of points to be made and paid close attention to spelling and grammar. I received nearly a perfect score.
I cannot say that I would base someone's college admission on how he performed on the impromptu SAT/GRE written exams, but I would certainly take them as a measure of his critical thinking and organizational skills. After all, nitpicking aside, most people should be well-enough versed in grammar and punctuation after middle school that writing technically correct sentences should be nearly second-nature. However, if one only has a modest grasp on the principles of written language AND a lack of critical/logical thinking abilities, well, that's the deal-breaker. Such deficiencies can at least be partly visualized in such test results.
Of course, some people are 'not good test-takers' and others may have 'had a bad day' while testing. Again, these things do happen. However, life is full of under-pressure situations and bad days. Those who can perform well on exams like these might not be the smartest people in the world, but they are certainly good at beating the system, thinking logically, have intestinal fortitude worth mentioning and will likely do well in real life (that is, life after school).
If a client sends me an email or memo that I have to take extra measures to decipher, I bill for the service. When one of my contractors sends out garbage, I simply don't read it. If it is a consistent problem, I stop 'remembering' to pay them.
No matter what your profession, it is critical to be able to express your thoughts clearly and logically in written language. I'm quite sure I'm not the only person who takes this skill quite seriously.
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Comparing literature and blogging is like comparing cows and horses. They both eat grass, true, but they have quite different uses. What they are saying is "Look! they aren't riding their cows as we ride our horses! I wonder what that means."
I'll be honest, when I was in high school all I had to do was BS my way through every essay/paper and I got a good grade. Like it was said before, as long as you know the rubric you know what you need to write.
We used to know that. What we have here looks to me like a symptom of national Alzheimers in the US. Doing dumb things without once questioning whether they will work. A sort of group "Hey, watch this" thing. One wonders if alien terrorists have put stupid pills in our drinking water.
Anyway, on the Codger really bad idea scale which runs from -10 (Invading Iraq, The Windows Registry, Prohibition) to -1 (allowing prescription drugs to be advertised on TV), SAT essay tests seem to me to be about a -7. They are roughly equivalent to letting a blind man judge the winner of a horse race by listening to a defective recording of the horses' hoofbeats made 20 meters from the finish line. They are unlikely to tell us one meaningful thing about the writing skills of either High School seniors or of bloggers.
And no, I'm not the only person that thinks these tests are a joke.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This is a trick question isn't it. The answer is neither!
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The articles seem to touch upon the fact that Bloggers didn't stick to the assignment, not that their writing was necessarily poor.
I was struck by the number of people who wrote essays without apparently thinking the directions applied to them. They made assumptions about the assignment, or decided that they were better judges of what the assignment should be, and then wrote what they wanted to write rather than produced what they were asked to write.
Often writers tried to be clever with roundabout ways of coming at the question, but it only made my job as a grader more difficult, and grumpy graders don't give fives and sixes.
They also tended to equivocate more, to argue the merits of both sides, which, though it might mark you as a reasonable person in normal discussion (in real or online life), actually hurts your SAT score.
This doesn't really surprise me, especially the last comment. High school students are taught to follow the directions and in the case of essays, make a point for one side or the other. The "perfectly written" high school essay is one that is easy for the grader to assign a mark to, after all. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but naturally a blogger is going to put their own "spin" on the assignment. They are going to be more creative with the questions, and possibly bring up the pros and cons of both sides. After all, they are writing for a larger audience than a grader.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Right, it's looking for adequacy, not brilliance. That's the point of the test, and it succeeds at that. If you cannot write coherently in a short amount of time your skills are inadequate.
Education is being ruined by everyone making excuses for inability. Some people are supposed to do badly. That's how you screen people! Would you like school to be structured in a way where everyone automatically gets a good grade on every exam? Because that's what it's really turning into as standards keep getting lowered allowing more people to graduate without having learned the skills they need.
If the test is set up in a way that only a few do well, that means it's a good test. Those with great aptitude should be at the top of the curve. You seem to think that someone who has to struggle so hard to get a few words out that they can't complete a simple writing assignment can still be a good writer. I think that given enough time they may be able to reach an acceptable level, but they will never be good because they don't have the talent. They might be able to write something that makes sense, but they will not be able to write anything worth reading.
I don't care if someone can't write. It's not a talent that everyone needs. When you have a blog, however, it implies that you think others should be reading your crap. In that case, you had better possess at least the bare minimum of ability required to do the job right.
Right, it's looking for adequacy, not brilliance. That's the point of the test, and it succeeds at that. If you cannot write coherently in a short amount of time your skills are inadequate.
Education is being ruined by everyone making excuses for inability. Some people are supposed to do badly. That's how you screen people! Would you like school to be structured in a way where everyone automatically gets a good grade on every exam? Because that's what it's really turning into as standards keep getting lowered allowing more people to graduate without having learned the skills they need.
If the test is set up in a way that only a few do well, that means it's a good test. Those with great aptitude should be at the top of the curve. You seem to think that someone who has to struggle so hard to get a few words out that they can't complete a simple writing assignment can still be a good writer. I think that given enough time they may be able to reach an acceptable level, but they will never be good because they don't have the talent. They might be able to write something that makes sense, but they will not be able to write anything worth reading.
I don't care if someone can't write. It's not a talent that everyone needs. When you have a blog, however, it implies that you think others should be reading your crap. In that case, you had better possess at least the bare minimum of ability required to do the job right.
I took the SAT years ago, and the GRE just a couple months ago. I consider myself a damn good writer, but the SAT and GRE isn't looking for good writing. Given the limited time frame, you have to work from a formula. Introductory paragraph with thesis in first sentence, arguments in middle with strongest arguments first and last, with a concluding paragraph which always starts with "In conclusion..." Combine this with some of the blandest topics known to man, and you get complete sh!t (and a perfect score). When I was in college, I sometimes took an hour to write one sentence of a paper. Inline Nietzsche quotes take time to structure. Complex thinking requires complex writing. Journalists write a couple articles a day, but they're also writing at about an 8th grade reading level. If you want good writing don't put a stressed out high schooler in a classroom with 30 other stressed out people tapping pencils and shuffling feet and tell them that the next hour will determine their future chances of success.
Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?
By SamSim
The process of learning from the past works as follows: a situation arises for a person. The person acts and the situation changes in some way - everything may be resolved or everything may go drastically wrong or any outcome between those could also occur. Time then passes, before a similar situation to what happened before arises. Here's where memory comes in. By remembering what happened when he took the previous action, the person can now make a reasonable guess as to what will happen when he makes a similar action in this similar situation - depending on circumstances he may also be able to evaluate what would happen if he took the diametrically opposite action and/or what would happen differently if he took precisely the same action in this slightly different situation.
The key point is that the person REMEMBERS what happened last time around. Without memory, this second situation is as new to the individual as the first situation. Without memory, the process of learning - that is, the process of assimilating information and allowing one's future actions to be guided by it - simply cannot occur. Likewise, without learning, the only way to succeed in the present is to use one's intelligence alone to accurately predict the possible outcomes of all possible actions and pick the correct one - something which is admittedly possible in some situations, but assuredly impossible when the utterly unforseeable and unexpected can arise without warning.
But there are drawbacks. For example, in a frantic moment where there isn't time to think - a sports match, or a street fight - stopping to think slows one down. That fraction of a second can lose you a point, or your life. Likewise, remembering a time when a similar situation arose and you made the wrong move, resulting in highly undesirable consequences, can paralyse you on the spot - you don't want to do ANYTHING in case the same thing happens again.
However, there is no substitute for experience. Nobody can predict the future - at least, not very accurately, and not very far, and certainly not when other human beings, the largest variables imaginable, are involved. But knowing what worked in the past can enable you to make good guesses about what works in the present.
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That took me about 15 minutes. I stopped early because I was using a word processor - I write much slower longhand. I agree with the points made in my sibling posts and the parent - this is a gigantic question and not a simple one, and you could very easily spend two hours, or even six months, trying and failing to compose an answer. Horrible. This isn't an SAT question, this is a thesis.
qntm.org
Too many responders have come out against the SAT essay and this unscientific comparison. I want to defned it.
A meaure of thinking...
There is critisicm that the essay question is boring and uninspiring. So what? Can you, a thinking person, take the topic, and after short reflection, form four or five coherent, grammatical, and interesting sentances in support or against it? If you can then you have an outline of the essay right there. You also have the topic sentances for your paragrapphs, and your first draft is essentially done.
Are your sentances coherent? They are if the reader can see they relate to the topic at hand. Are they grammatical? Then you are good at communicating in English. Are they interesting? Then you might be an original thinker.
It is a real world scenario. You may have to complete a report that you care nothing for. You may have to sell boring ideas in a memo that needs to go out right away. Brainstorm and write five points in support, and outline it all in 5 minutes.
A meaure of writing...
Now fill in the rest, staying on topic within each paragraph, supporting your thesis and topic sentances. This is exactly what an essay should be. Do your best to communicate your ideas, even if you don't have great enthusiam for them.
Too litle time? You audience doesn't have the time to read it either. Time constraints are a very important part of communication. Be succinct, but stay on topic. That should be easy since you've already drafted your thesis early on.
What's interesting about the experiment is that bloggers, who generally tend to write free-form and not draft their ideas, have abandoned or ignored the very simple lessons we teach high-schoolers about essay writing. What's worse, they've drifted from the topic, or failed to sddress it at all. There's alot of 'navel-gazing' in blogging, and this preference for lightly ego-feuled self expression causes a certain kind of resentment when their expressions should 'conform' to some standard.
But they should conform. They were given a topic, and so many could not, or would not, write about it. How can you communicate with someone when you can't/won't engage the topic at hand?
There are qualities of thinking and writing measured by this test. The simple fact that some can do well, and others can't, shows this. Some can communicate quickly and effectivly. They can think under pressure, and express themselves well. Many cannot, and this is what is being measured. The test seems to have done it's job.
It isn't formulaic or requires one to write-to-the-test. It shouldn't measure how you want to spend your days as a freelance writer, pounding away on your first novel, or a quirky piece for from some 'zine. It isn't fiction writing or poetry, and most of all, it isn't blogging as we know it. It's the non-fiction communication of ideas, which is something bloggers should all be atuned to.
Can you communicate well?
I think the real question is why are we trying to pretend that there's some objective standard of measuring a quality like "literary ability", when we pretty much know that there isn't one?
If the goal is to acheive a fair meritocracy, well look around a bit. Is that what American society looks like to you at present? We have a president that we have to distinguish by using his middle initial (either that or admit that we should be calling him "the second").
my 1337 r1Gh71n6 Sk1Lz.