I was definitely not aware that the SAT required you to take an unethical essay. In fact, I have little knowledge when comes to the SAT in general. It came to me in quite a surprise that the SAT essay graders don't really spend a lot of time on grading each individual paper. I honestly can't blame them since they have a crazy policy,"readers get a bonus if they read 30 essays an hour." I was bewildered to see how corrupt our grading system actually is. The article does a phenomenal job at exploiting and explaining all the holes in the grading system.
The article also explained how the strategies to get a good grade on the SAT essay were practically not applicable to any other form of writing. The way to ace the essay has no way in any correlation on how good of a writer one actually is. This in turn unleashes bad writers in the world. See if one takes a class on how to be successful on the writing portion of the SAT. The graduates of that class will continue to use the writing habits learned beyond the SAT. This in my personal opinion is horrifying. I believe that such a major test should be providing you with an experience that can help you throughout life, not hinder it.
Another interesting and surprising point from the article, is that teachers are actually becoming bad teachers because of the SAT essay. Since their pay relies on how high the SAT score is, they will only teach their students methods on how to succeed only in the SAT essay. I find this quite corrupt as well. I cannot believe that teachers actually get more money if their students score higher on such a poorly created test. This definitely should not be the case. It is plain obvious that these types of work incentives are prone to quickly become unethical and corrupt in due time.
Overall, I learn quite a lot from reading this article. Never before have I pondered on how the SAT essay was graded. I hope that in the near future, the SAT essay will be revamped into a more positive piece of work.
I completely agree with your opinion on how horrifying the grading system is for the SAT and think that it definitely needs changing. Teachers are “. . .under a huge amount of pressure from parents to teach to the test and to get their kids high scores . . .” when they know that they aren’t teaching them writing correctly. Bad writers are being sent out into the world by the classful and it is all because of a silly test that doesn’t really prove anything besides how fast you can write even if the essay makes no sense. If the grading system for the SAT doesn’t change then where will our good writing concepts go? The Answer: Down the trash.
ReplyDeleteI think that it's insane that they would have policies as unethical as this, all of which are news to me. Do they not realize that entire lives depend on the scores highschool graduates get on these tests? I think that the SAT grading requirements need to be rewritten. If they're not the scorers will only get lazier, and the scoring more lax. I hope to see these changes soon, hopefully before I take the test myself. I would rather be taught effective writing methods that I can use throughout my entire life.
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