It turns out that good writing is so important to MIT that one of their professors took the time to analyze the SAT Essay to see how good a measure of writing skills it is.
It turns out that in Dr. Les Perelman’s opinion it is not a good measure of writing skills. I know that sounds surprising. How can a writing test not be a good measure of writing skills? Unfortunately it’s true. And essay can score well or badly based on some simple criteria that have nothing to do with good writing. For example, just by writing a long essay–over 400 words–a student can almost assure that they’ll get the highest possible score of 12.
Because my book is based on research such as that done by Dr. Perelman, I let students know about this important fact as well as others they need to know to do well on the SAT Essay.
However, if you want to get the whole story about Dr. Perelman’s research click on the link below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html
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