We Are Teaching High School Students to Write Terribly

This essay, which was added to the SAT in 2005, counts for approximately 30 percent of a test-taker's score on the writing section, or nearly one-ninth of one's total score. That may not seem like much, but with competition for spots at top colleges and universities more fierce than ever, performance on a portion of the test worth around 11 percent of the total could be the difference between Stanford and the second tier. So it's not surprising that students seek strategies and tips that will help them succeed on the writing exercise. Les Perelman, the recently retired former director of MIT's Writing Across the Curriculum program, has got a doozy.

To do well on the essay, he says, the best approach is to just make stuff up.

"It doesn't matter if [what you write] is true or not," says Perelman, who helped create MIT's writing placement test and has consulted at other top universities on the subject of writing assessments. "In fact, trying to be true will hold you back." So, for instance, in relaying personal experiences, students who take time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives are at a disadvantage, he says. "The best advice is, don't try to spend time remembering an event," Perelman adds, "Just make one up. And I've heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn't die."

This approach works, and is advisable, he suggests, because of how the SAT essay is structured and graded. Here's a typical essay prompt taken from the College Board website. It follows a short, three-sentence passage noting that people hold different views on the subject to be discussed:

Assignment: Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present? 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.

After spending a few moments reading a prompt similar to that one, test takers have 25 minutes in which to draft a submission that will be scored on a 1-to-6 scale. (No scratch paper is provided for outlining or essay planning.) Most students choose to write what is referred to as "the standard five-paragraph essay": introductory and concluding paragraphs book-ending three paragraphs of support in between. Each essay is later independently graded by two readers in a manner that harkens to the famous I Love Lucy scene wherein Lucy and Ethel attempt to wrap chocolate candies traveling on an unrelenting conveyor belt.

Anne Ruggles Gere, a professor at the University of Michigan, serves as director of the Sweetland Center for Writing, which oversees first-year writing at the university. She speaks with SAT essay-graders often. "What they tell me is that they go through a very regimented scoring process, and the goal of that process is to produce so many units of work in a very short period of time," she says. "So if they take more than about three minutes to read and score these essays, they are eliminated from the job of scoring." According to Perelman, especially speedy graders are rewarded for their efforts. "They expect readers to read a minimum of 20 essays an hour," he says. "But readers get a bonus if they read 30 essays an hour, which is two minutes per essay."

Gere and Perelman aren't the only ones who know about the demands placed upon SAT essay graders. Many students do, too. Those with a firm grasp of what time-pressured essay-readers care about—and, to be sure, what things they don't care about—can increase their chances at a high score by resorting to all sorts of approaches that are, shall we say, less than ideal. For starters, facts don't just take a back seat when it comes to describing personal experiences on the SAT essay; they don't matter in general.

"There's really no concern about factual accuracy," says Gere. "In fact, the makers of the SAT have indicated that in scoring it really doesn't matter if you say that the War of 1812 occurred in 1817. The complete lack of attention to any kind of accuracy of information conveys a very strange notion of what good writing might be."

That's one way of putting it. Perelman, who has trained SAT takers on approaches for achieving the highest possible essay score, has another.

"What they are actually testing," he says, "is the ability to bullshit on demand. There is no other writing situation in the world where people have to write on a topic that they've never thought about, on demand, in 25 minutes. Lots of times we have to write on demand very quickly, but it's about things we've thought about. What they are really measuring is the ability to spew forth as many words as possible in as short a time as possible. It seems like it is training students to become politicians."

Graders don't have time to look up facts, or to check if an especially uncommon word actually exists, or perhaps even to do anything more than skim an essay before making a grading determination. Score-savvy essay writers can figure out what might catch the eye of a skimmer.

"I tell students to always use quotations, because the exam readers love quotations," Perelman says. "One of the other parts of the formula is use big words. Never use many, always use myriad or plethora. Never say bad, always use egregious."

Of course, according the College Board website that millions of students have used to prepare for the exam, "there are no shortcuts to success on the SAT essay." And the country's largest test prep company, Kaplan, does not teach such approaches. (Disclosure: Kaplan is owned by the soon-to-be-renamed Washington Post Company, which also owns Slate.)

Kaplan's director of SAT and ACT programs, Colin Gruenwald, tutors students, helps write the company's curriculum, and trains Kaplan teachers. He says throwing around "big words" in an attempt to influence essay readers is an unnecessarily risky endeavor. He insists that the scoring model is a holistic one that focuses on the overall impression of one's writing skills. "The point is to demonstrate that you have command of the language, that you are able, in a pressure environment, to sit down and formulate coherent and persuasive thoughts," he says. Students need to include certain components, he notes. "But that's not a trick. That's not a gimmick. That's just good education."