I’m looking at yesterday’s Charlotte Observer and they’re talking about the writing requirement for the new SAT test. They even have a sample essay question. So I figure, I’ve got 25 minutes — let’s see how I can do. Here goes:
Today’s essay question is about failure, and how Thomas Edison saw “failing” as something that will eventually help you succeed. Failure is certainly very much on the mind of a student who is in the process of taking a test that will determine their fate for the rest of their life. We can view failure on the SAT from three different perspectives: the perspective of the test-taker, the perspective of the test-maker, and the perspective of the test-grader. Depending on your perspective, the new writing requirement for the SAT can be considered an abysmal failure, or a glowing success.
Let’s first consider the perspective of the student. Every student learns to write a five-paragraph essay. Even my then-nine-year-old daughter learned it when she was in the third grade. It’s a simple way to organize an essay: you divide a topic into three parts, and each of those parts becomes a paragraph in your essay. All through high school students are encouraged to write five-paragraph essays, but when they reach college, the first thing their freshman writing teacher tells them is to forget about that tried-and-true five-paragraph essay. Sophisticated college argument requires much more than five paragraphs. However, it is a good standby when forced to write an answer to a stupid essay question in only twenty-five minutes. From the student’s perspective, then, their entire high school writing career isn’t necessarily a failure, as long as it gets them into college.
For the test-maker, however, things get a little more complex. They had a good racket going with the old way of doing things: everyone knows that 1600 is a good score on the SAT and 400 is sub-moronic. Why mess with success? Some had suggested that the old SAT was a failure because it didn’t ask students to demonstrate college-level skills. How often are college students required to take antonym or analogy tests, for example? On the other hand, creating a new writing requirement is risky, too. After all, an essay can only be judged subjectively. Who’s to say whether or not an essay is well-done? What’s a “good” score on a writing test? Won’t students inevitably revert to formulaic, 5-paragraph-essay responses? Only time will tell whether the new writing requirement is a success or a failure for the test-makers.
For the test grader, however, things couldn’t be clearer. Test grading is one of the most demanding, yet underappreciated professions there is. Test graders must be intelligent, fair, fast, and critical. They say the most of them are also very good looking. Certainly the new writing requirement has generated a lot of new work for test graders. One thing I can say for certain is that qualified test graders should never be replaced by computers. That would surely be a failure.
So determining whether the new SAT writing requirement is a success or a failure is a difficult question. Edison might point out that every failure gets you one step closer to success. However, Edison never had to take the SAT test.
So, how did I do?