March 12, 2014:  Without The Essay, SATs Are Just Just A T-ease.

Prompt:  Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.

The College Board and the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) announced significant changes recently, in part to recover lost market share to the ACT test, and in part to represent a more diverse population.  Read the short summary and respond as below.

Assignment:  What are the effects you foresee with the changed SAT? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

So, the SAT has decided to come into the 21^st century?  On the surface, what's not to love: Simplified scoring; Elimination of a required essay; Basic math computation done without a calculator; Less high level abstract math; Less obscure vocabulary; No penalties for wrong answers. Say it ain’t so, Joe.  Some of these changes come three and a half decades too late for me, while others come several millennia too soon for me.  I might cavil the change in the vocabulary section, flummoxed by the depreciation of language arts, but the true paroxysm comes when we consider the situation of the eliminated required essay.

Some of the reasons they eliminated the essay are because students were too busy trying to sound pretentious, awkwardly adding thinly connected famous quotes just to show they had memorized them, and ultimately producing a less than stellar example of the student's expository writing abilities.  The required essay didn't even get introduced until 2005, so admissions' officers at colleges and universities around the country (or at least the two or three I applied to) were spared what probably would have been my own pretentious aside into the value of German language and culture to personal growth (for people who didn't know me then, I had the prestigious title of Vice President of the German Club in High School; "Beir macht spass!" was our battle cry).

Despite the shallowness of the average 17-year old, their ability to write well will be key to their academic and career success.  Expository writing is argumentation, pure and simple, a skill so valuable in critical thinking, problem solving, and ultimately career advancement.  Without argumentation, discourse turns into contradiction ("Das ist kein argument; das ist einfach widerspruch!") How can the College Board not see the value of such skills in identifying college-ready students?  Only the most  dis-reputable college (“Du weiss du wer warden!”) wants less assessment of their entering students.

As with common core and "No Child Left Behind," we are turning to more and more standardized, as precisely as possible, testing. How long will it take before it is evident that those kinds of tests are really a tease?  A shadow of a person emerges, but none of the grey matter that falls between the black and white.  So much for diversity.

The irony is that the world today is nothing but commentary.  The world's most prominent professional social media network, LinkedIn, subjects us daily to feeds that are a hodge-podge of people’s opinions masquerading as expert testimony.  The Huffington Post, enjoyable as it is, basically provides 95% op-ed pieces, and 5% actual news stories.  Heck, even The New York Times, if you look at all of their “sections,” engage more in commentary than what we find in their “opinion” section.  Why is it that at a time when editorializing defines social media would a major test of college readiness downplay the importance of essay-writing?

I am prompted, literally, to say that as with all else nebulous in nature, and thus not able to exist within a nice rubric, the College Board is throwing up its hands and giving in to the fact that the essay has been rendered meaningless.  I am prompted to say that well-crafted essay writing is . . . aw, what the hell, nobody cares.

Cue cat meme.