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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
The reason people think shakespeare is high literature is that nobody really understands it well enough to get the dirty jokes. If they actually knew what he was saying, they'd ban it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I tried, but he kept wanting to know what I was wearing and what my penis size was.
The strong bias towards math probably exists because... well, this is going to sound stupid, but math is quantitative, and writing is qualitative.
It's easy to say that little Timmy is a math prodigy because he's solving integrals in his head by the time he's in seventh grade. It's very difficult to say that little Billy is a literary prodigy because the degree of assimilation and the quality of work produced are both measured very subjectively. In math and science, there are simple, fairly straightforward ways of measuring how well a student _recalls_ concepts and how well they can _apply_ the concepts. That latter one does require someone to read a bunch of logic on paper, and then estimate how well the kid has applied the concepts they've learned (i.e. does the student seem to understand "force" or is she just plugging and chugging), but that can be objectively determined (did she get the right answer, and do her steps to that answer clear and logical).
In writing, someone has to actually sit down and read everything they student has written, judge it as objectively as they can, and then assign it a number grade. You could give a test on sentence structure, comprehension, and so on--which they do--and still have no idea if the kid can write. The writing needs to be clear and logical, but what's clear and logical in an essay is by no means as straightforward as what's clear and logical in a physics problem solution.
What I'm trying to say, really, is that there is probably a bias towards math at least in some part because basic-level math is very easy to grade and evaluate, whereas to judge writing is more nebulous.
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.
I recently took the new SAT I. I did well, and have no complaints about my score, particularly in writing. This is just to clarify that my critiques aren't from any personal feelings, but rather from logic and experience.
First of all, multitudes of people taking the SAT either lack the skillset required to complete the essay section sucessfully or aren't specifically prepared for the test.
It's not about being a good writer, or being prolific, or even conveying your thoughts. It's only about writing to the test.
Therefore, it's insane to make serious literary criticisms on these writers when they're doing no more than plugging in their personal experiences and bits from US Hisotry to answer the questions. Even the best writers don't necessarily do well; many of my friends, who are much better writers than I, didn't do anywhere near as well as I did. I'm the first to admit I'm not a particularly good writer. But it's not about writing. It's about plugging the test prompt into a preconcieved formula and outputting whatever gobblygook you have to based on the grading rubric. So there are basically a plethora of flaws here.
Looking at more criticism:
"What does this really demonstrate? It's hard to say. Probably, that students who do well on the SAT writing test will also do well writing college application essays. Also, I'll bet that the tactic of Essay #2 (and to a lesser extent #3) will serve as the template for all future test-prep classes, and SAT graders of the future will come to cherish the increasingly rare students following the lead of #4."
Going through the college application process myself, I can tell you that what the college admissions professionals look for is nowhere near the same as what the SAT people look for. The SAT graders are simply looking for compliance with a strict formula and a specific sort of writing. It doesn't delight them to have a new, insightful, or personal spin on things. These "creative" touches simply throw them off their schedule - the graders, even those that grade online, have a cue in the form of a stopsign that warns them if they're going too quickly or too slowly. And the graders themselves get penalized if they grade an essay too far away from the other graders (each essay is graded at least twice). Furthermore, the lowest scoring students (as alluded to in the NYT) just ramble on about themselves or their lives, without relating back to the topic. The graders see far to many of these ineffective essays, so it's both dangerous to write one and dangerous to say that the graders like it when they're written.
What this amounts to is a strict penalty for those essays that are either personal or creative, both qualities that college admissions officers laud.
As for predicting that future test-coaches will advise you to take the tact of essay #2, that is, providing a personal and a literary set of anecdotes, I can assure you that such a strategy HAS been in place for quite a long time. I formulated a basic outline before I even BEGAN studying for the SAT's, because the format on the test is the same as EVERY OTHER type of high school writing prompt in the world. I have taken writing tests in two different states - Florida and Virginia. The tests are indistinguisable from each other. These types of prompts have been around for a while, and are here to stay.
~R
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