Good article in the Globe today describing the written part of the SAT. These ‘grafs are money:

Les Perelman, director of MIT’s writing program, disagrees. He became so frustrated by what he believed were formulaic essays that freshmen were turning in after the SAT essay was introduced that he conducted an experiment: He trained three high school students, who had taken the SAT once already, to insert some factual errors, use big words, and ignore logical thought on the SAT essay, and each received a near-perfect score.

“They’ve learned to write paragraph essays where they don’t care whether the facts are correct,” Perelman said. “We have to spend a year in freshman composition deprogramming them.”

Bunin and other College Board officials contend that Perelman’s findings are inconclusive, since he only worked with a few students. But they acknowledge that factual accuracy was not crucial in the scoring.

“What the essay portion is about is a student’s ability to express himself in writing,” Bunin said. “This is not a research paper.”

I can’t think of another context where content would be irrelevant to one’s writing.