Brevity Is the Deathknell for a Good SAT Score

In the next weeks, Dr. Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing "anchor" samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.

He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. "I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time." The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.

If that's the case, who needs the scorers, when you can have a computer program analysis do the work for you. Base your grade on how well you score on any of the following scales, (Gunning Fog Index, Flesch Reading Ease, and
Flesch-Kincaid Grade), and you'd probably have a good idea of what you'll do on the SAT writing exam.

If fact checking is indeed not necessary on these exams, then the education establishment (ETS) is really doing a good job of training the next generation of journalists to treat facts as mere props for their own amusement. They'll certainly be even better at lying about the facts and news than the current crop of journalists.