A NYT reporter struggles with the SAT II
New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin discovers that grading SAT II essays isn't as easy as it looks. She entered the training seminar with some skepticism:
Given 25 years making a living writing for newspapers, I came in thinking that I, too, would know good writing. I also came in quite skeptical that readers could be trained to adhere to objective grading standards on something as emotionally subjective as writing. That will soon be a crucial question for millions of high school students: starting in two years, the two million college applicants who take the SAT each year will be required to produce a sample essay...
At my grading session, about 100 teachers from across the country are being paid $22 an hour to grade the 33,000 essays produced at the May 3 SAT II writing test. Each essay is read by at least two graders, so over the five days, each one will be plowing through some 660 essays...
As the day goes on, she discovers that, while she is able to detect a bad essay as well as the trained raters, her standards for a good essay are inconsistent with the others' viewpoints:
I give the same bad grades as everybody else. But I am way off on the good ones. I give a 3 to the paper that the experienced readers saw as the model of 6-ness. It begins with the sentence, "The world has taken a turn for the worst." I am put off by "worst" where it should have said "worse" — and by the way the writer talks about political correctness and homogenization, without ever explaining how they make the world worse...I sit down with the trainers to see if I can discover the error of my ways.
They explain that I should not have been put off by the first sentence, that it's just a beginning stutter, to be overlooked. And, they say, what makes it a 6 is the sophisticated use of language, the organization and the lively, detailed examples, one about Clear Channel Communications and how it prevented its radio stations from broadcasting Rage Against the Machine after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the other about how the New York Regents exams had been sanitized for political correctness.
They go back over the standards with me: a 6 demonstrates clear and consistent competence, and is well organized and fully developed, with a variety of sentence structures, a range of vocabulary and only occasional errors. A 4 shows adequate competence, with some errors in grammar or diction and minimal sentence variety.
Her conclusion is a little weird, though. Learning how to rate SAT II essays resulted in her losing "all memory of my old criteria for judging writing," as though learning to grade SAT II essays is more brainwashing than training.