FEBRUARY 2006 :: EDUCATION

The Essay Question
Does the SAT Writing Test Mean Anything? Some Colleges Say No.

BY CHARLES FORELLE
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

The prospect of churning out a coherent essay in the midst of the pressure-filled SAT test has been making high-school students around the country quake. But now that the first results of the new SAT writing test are in, many colleges say they're ignoring them.

The University of Chicago, Ohio State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions say scores on the writing test won't figure into their admissions decisions this year. "We don't know what they mean," says Ted O'Neill, Chicago's dean of admissions. "We don't know what they predict."

The writing section, which includes grammar and usage questions along with a 25-minute essay on a prescribed topic, represents the most significant change in decades to the college-entrance test. The new section was meant to address complaints that writing skills get short shrift in
college admissions.

But some admissions officers say the essay's predictive value hasn't been established, that it tests a narrow skill—writing quickly—that isn't core to a college education. They also fear that it can easily be coached and thus favor students from wealthy families who can afford tutoring.

‘A Really Skeptical Eye'

Some schools are giving less consideration to the writing than to other sections of the test, or counting it on a case-by-case basis if it helps tip the scales. "We are using it with a really skeptical eye," says Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Haverford, Pa. Mr. Lord says his office will consider the writing score but won't give it much weight if it's inconsistent with the rest of a student's application.

In a survey of 374 colleges conducted last summer by test-prep outfit Kaplan, 47% said they were discounting the SAT writing section entirely. Twenty-two percent said they were assigning it less weight than the longstanding math and verbal sections. (This year's SAT also includes some changes to those sections, now called math and critical reading. The 25-minute essay counts for about 30% of the writing section's 800-point score.)

Caren L. Scoropanos, a spokeswoman for the College Board, the nonprofit group that creates the test, says that while performance data from the first year of the testing won't be available until August, the organization is confident the test is ready for broad adoption. The new SAT was first administered last March.

Stephen Farmer, director of admission at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says his school will use the SAT writing score "sparingly if at all" in the first year but will keep the scores on file to see for future years whether they correlate well with academic performance. Still, he said admissions officers weren't entirely disregarding it.

Mr. Farmer recalled one applicant his office had recently considered. The student's performance on the two traditional SAT sections put her in just the 35th percentile of UNC's enrolling population—far from an easy admission. But she stood out for presenting herself in UNC's application as a "lively, interesting kid," Mr. Farmer says. She notched the highest possible score on the essay section of the SAT, bolstering the admissions officers' positive view. She got a thumbs-up.

The new section came about after Richard C. Atkinson, then president of the University of California, called in 2001 for the elimination of the SAT requirement in the UC admissions process, and said the test should be made to conform more closely to high-school and college work, with a particular emphasis on writing.

‘Business Decision'

Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., says she has concerns because the new test "did not come from the grass roots," and appeared rather to be a "business decision" to keep University of California applicants in the test-taking pool. Ms. Jones says she isn't confident in the grading system, which instructs graders to disregard factual errors in almost all circumstances. Instead, the emphasis is on rating language usage, structure and logical flow.

Ms. Jones also says she worries deeply that the focus on writing could hurt students from poorer backgrounds, or whose parents didn't go to college, or from families where English isn't spoken at home. "Those kids have a tendency to get left out," she says. They "are going to get clobbered on the SAT—worse than before."

Test scores correlate strongly with parents' income and educational attainment, according to the College Board. And students who reported English as their first language had a mean verbal score of 519 in last year's SAT, compared with 462 among those who learned another language first. But Ms. Scoropanos says the College Board's research doesn't show a greater socioeconomic bias with the new SAT than before.

Some schools, however, are openly embracing the new test. "We are using it," says John Blackburn, dean of admissions at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He says his school has long relied on the supplemental SAT subject test for writing, on which the new SAT section is modeled. Such supplemental tests are generally required at more-selective schools, in addition to the main SAT. Mr. Blackburn says he is convinced that the new section "is going to put more emphasis on writing in high schools across the country."

At Ohio State University in Columbus, SAT writing scores won't be considered at least until 2008, said Mabel Freeman, assistant vice president for undergraduate admissions. Ohio State will analyze the scores for predictive value before deciding whether to use them.

Ms. Freeman is hoping the correlation is there. Grade inflation at high schools has made it more difficult to discern who's really qualified, she says, and any useful tool is welcome. "Students need to be able to respond to situations analytically with clear thoughts in a somewhat limited time frame, because that's the way the world works," she says.