{"id":95,"date":"2007-09-21T09:53:47","date_gmt":"2007-09-21T13:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=95"},"modified":"2007-09-21T10:30:21","modified_gmt":"2007-09-21T14:30:21","slug":"testing-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"Testing writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Good <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/local\/articles\/2007\/09\/20\/many_colleges_ignore_sat_writing_test?mode=PF\">article<\/a> in the Globe today describing the written part of the SAT.  These &#8216;grafs are money: <\/p>\n<p>Les Perelman, director of MIT&#8217;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,<strong> <em>to insert some factual errors, use big words, and ignore logical thought on the SAT essay, and each received a near-perfect score.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ve learned to write paragraph essays where they don&#8217;t care whether the facts are correct,&#8221; Perelman said. &#8220;We have to spend a year in freshman composition deprogramming them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Bunin and other College Board officials contend that Perelman&#8217;s findings are inconclusive, since he only worked with a few students. But they acknowledge that factual accuracy was not crucial in the scoring.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;<strong>What the essay portion is about is a student&#8217;s ability to express himself in writing<\/strong>,&#8221; Bunin said. &#8220;This is not a research paper.&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t think of another context where content would be irrelevant to one&#8217;s writing.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good article in the Globe today describing the written part of the SAT. These &#8216;grafs are money: Les Perelman, director of MIT&#8217;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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=95\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Testing writing<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-of-note"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8rNFZ-1x","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}