Posted on 05/30/2005 1:58:51 PM PDT by Ultra Sonic
Here's an interesting story about the SAT. As of a couple of years ago, a new test was introduced: the Reasoning test.
There are five topics on the SAT Reasoning Test: Critical Reading, Math, Writing, Multiple Choice, and an Essay.
However, the topic I want to show you is the Essay. Specifically, my own.
There are five topics on the SAT Reasoning Test: Critical Reading, Math, Writing, Multiple Choice, and an Essay.
However, the topic I want to show you is the Essay. Specifically, my own.
xxxx
The essay is graded by two readers, with a possible score of 12. The highest score one reader can give is 6. If the scores of both readers varies by more than two, then a third reader will be brought in.
The essay is 25 minutes long, and two pages are provided.
A scoring guide can be found below.
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/about/sat/essay_scoring.html
xxxx
The issue presented below is part of the assignment offered for the essay.
"It's easy to see why - aside from the income it provides - having a job is so desirable in our culture. Work works for us. It structures our time and imposes a rhythm on our lives. It gets us organized into various kinds of communities and social groups. And perhaps most important, work tells us what to do every day." - Adapted from Joanne B. Ciulla, 'The Working Life'
Assignment: Do people depend on work - whether it is a job, schoolwork, or volunteer work - to determin what their daily activities with others should be? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on the issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Now for the essay, word-for-word.
xxxx
Work. It is the backbone of any functional and working society (pun fully intended). The labor force drives the economy. Without it, our lives would have no meaning.
How do I know?
Welfare.
Sure, a weekly welfare check MAY seem pleasant; however, I must ask: is the sense of reward the same? The sense of satisfaction from a hard day's work? The knowledge that your money is earned, and not taken from the taxpayer's pockets?
Of course not!
Am I being too harsh? Too cynical about those who live off the government?
Perhaps.
But the fact remains: work is its own award. It provides activity. It serves as income. It is a means by which people socialize. After all, how many friendships and marriages have been forged through work?
Quite a bit, I'd say.
Work is neccesary. It puts food on the table. It puts a roof over the head. And, perhaps, most importantly, it gives a sense of being.
Sure, work may seem hard, grueling, and unforgiving.
But then again, to get a good life, work is usually REQUIRED.
Ironic, no?
xxxx
Looking back, I found three things I could've done better with.
Instead of 'award', it should've been 'reward'.
I mispelled 'neccesary'. It should be 'necessary'.
Instead of 'quite a bit', it should've been 'quite a lot'.
My total score was 7; 4 from one reader, and 3 from another.
I don't think my essay was perfect - hardly - but who thinks that my position on welfare might have caused my essay to go down a point or two?
Just a thought.
Evidently, it's the length of the essay that seems to determine the score.
Here's an earlier thread discussing it.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1397024/posts
According to this NYT article, the SAT essay scorers reward length and ignore errors:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1397024/posts
Your essay form is non-standard and I would've marked you down for that. Then I may have been inclined to mark you down for writing a first person narrative instead of a classic essay.
Your style is excellent for a novel, but poor for an expository essay.
You can find a few tips here: http://essayinfo.com/
Also, if you know you're writing for a politically correct professor or scorer then it is best to play to your audience, get your grade, and critique the bastards to the heavens AFTER you get your diploma.
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45 years ago I had an english teacher who was a flat out commie.
The year before, he had indoctrinated and more or less created Molly Ivins.
Despite that orientation, he was fair and graded all of us on the quality of our exposition, not the opinions expressed.
There is no integrity left in any of today's leftists.
So9
Disregarding content for a moment, that looks to me like a very short essay and not very fleshed out or well supported by examples. It looks to me to have the length of depth of a Letter to the Editor. If I was the scorer, I would have to score it low regardless of the point of view you expressed in it.
I'd agree with that. In college I routinely turned in lengthy papers knowing they'd get an automatic 'A' as the teacher/prof had eighty to one hundred other papers to read on a given night. Basically, I just played strategy and turned in mediocre work with vast volumes of quoted material to support my ideas. Had quality really been an issue (as it was in my anatomy and physiology classes) then I would have paid more attention to it. For the most part, though, volume won out over quality.
"Also, if you know you're writing for a politically correct professor or scorer then it is best to play to your audience, get your grade, and critique the bastards to the heavens AFTER you get your diploma."
This is very good advice for business writing in general.
All the better to baffle them with bullsh!t, I'd say.
Personally, I prefer succinctness.
Trust me; on the essay paper, everything looked more like a regular essay and not so spread out. I tend to write big.
Of course, I write a lot of stories as a hobby.
And as for the politically correct professor, I didn't think such a thing would happen in ALABAMA of all things.
yeah you might have thrown in some political theory for some sophistication, like how the greatest failure of communism is that work was not rewarded based on effort and merit, in communist countries a doctor made the same money as a garbageman as a store clerk unless you were a member of the Communist party or an elite athlete or artist in which case you got benefits under the table- it is still the reason Eastern Germany is struggling, several generations of people used to working the minimum but being guaranteed the same money, enough to live, not enough to get rich, are having a hard time adjusting to competition and merit......
.......and how work is part of the productivity of a nation which determines its status in the global world economy, blah blah blah.......so it permeates every facet of life, social political even religious, for example Protestants believe that hard work not just religious good works will get you into heaven, and Dutch Christian Reform believe that men should not work under other men, they should not be slaves therefore you find most Dutch Christian Reform are set up in small businesses
Paragraph length and sentence length matter more than essay length. Practice writing exactly the format reccommended in SAT prep books and you'll get a good score.
When I took the GREs, I prepared for the written section by learning exactly the style and format they wanted, and got perfect scores. Nobody cares what's in the essay, they care that it meets their little guidelines.
Exactly.
I'd rather write stuff I KNOW is correct than non-factual crap for the sake of length.
Besides, my SAT score lands me in the top five percent in the country (total score is 1990 out of 2400), so I'm not worried.
I knew I had done very well on the question and answer portion and then came the essay. The essay was an analysis of documents about FDR and the Depression. I knew I was screwing myself, but I wrote an essay saying that FDR had made the effects of the Depression worse, etc. I was well aware of the analysis they were looking for, I just wasn't going to give it to them.
I received a 4 and was perfectly satisfied. I did much better on the European History AP exam, the essay there was about the effects of the bubonic plague on the decline of feudalism in the 14th century -- there's less of an agenda there.
As others have pointed out, it's not so much the length (though it does seem rather short) as the fact that you did not really write an expository essay. You wrote a short opinion piece. The 1st person style, filled with rhetorical questions ("Am I being too harsh? Too cynical about those who live off the government?") is not right for this assignment. You have to write a well-developed essay with supporting facts (the usual essay format requires 3 supporting paragraphs). You simply didn't include much "meat" in what you wrote.
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that you got low scores because someone disagreed with your political views (that kind of relexive defensiveness can be self-defeating). As I said, I agree with your point of view on the issue but if I were scoring you I would give similar scores to the ones you got. If you're planning to take the SAT again, bone up on your essay writing skills. You're a good writer but this kind of writing would fit better on the opinion page of your school newspaper, not in an SAT essay or a college essay.
That's not an essay. A Usenet rant, maybe, but not an essay. They were mercyful to you - no one should have given more than a single honorary point for showing up.
Point one - you do not contruct any coherent argument. You dont even go the length to reason at all - you just present a one sentence claim, and no reasoning at all.
Point two - you use way too much rhetorical fill words and sujets. You do not need rhetorical questions in an essay - certainly not in any second sentence. You do not need that abundance of exclamation marks, either.
Read the assignment. It clearly tells you why you failed here - none of what they ask for is shown in your text.
And your analysis shows that you do not even understand the problem - you complain about orthography and grammar errors (im sure you will find some in my writing, too). Judging an essay isn't about orthography or grammar at all - those a prerequisites you are expected to have mastered already anyway. It's about the verbal and analytical means to formulate an issue and clearly present well thought reasoning for it. It's about your capacity to comprehend and structure a problem for others to understand both the problem presented and the reasons that led to your judgement.
Where I went to school that "essay" of yours would have given me "0 points - topic failed". Even in 8th grade.
I have no love for the Educational Testing SErvice of Princeton NJ and view them as pretty much incompetent and I've had two experiences with them in particular which left really bad tastes in my mouth.
When I went to take the graduate record exam for math majors shortly before finishing my bachelors (in mathematics), there were two parts to the thing i.e. the general GRE for everybody and then the particular test for mathematicians.
I scored about 77'th percentile on the specific math section, i.e. the part in which I was being tested against all other applicants to graduate schools in mathematics, and about 99'th percentile in the verbal part of the ordinary test, but only about 90th percentile in the math section of the ordinary test and that's the part of the story which nobody was happy about. There had been one particular single paragraph description of a situation and five or six questions based upon it in which the paragraph was utterly ambiguous; all you could do is guess and if you worked consistently, you either got all of those questions right or all wrong according to whether or not you guessed right. Of the people in my graduating class who took the test, about half got those all right and the other half all wrong.
More recently somewhere around 1989, I walked into an auditorium at Norwich Univ. which at that time ran the nation's premier Russian language immersion program and the idea was that a number of us were going to be doing ETS a favor by trying out an experimental test for state dept. people and the idea was that we were going to listen to instructions in English for about five minutes, and then take the test in Russian.
Now, this was well into the age of modern electronics; nonetheless those turkeys brought out a tape recorder from somewhere back around 1955 when tape recorders were first invented, and I was utterly unable to understand the instructions in English, and my hearing is pretty much perfect and I have no difficulties whatsoever with the English language.
At that point, I walked out of the auditorium and told the ETS turkeys what I thought of them in no uncertain terms on the way out.
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