My First Academic Paper At Harvard

This is a paper written for Professor Richard Light of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, for my seminar on Tackling the Toughest Challenges of American Higher Education. The topic this week is about the much-debated SAT. Here is a two-page paper on the change I propose for the Writing Section of the SAT:

If I were the president of Harvard during those years, one of the things I would bring up to the ETS is the inclusion of a writing section in the SAT. Although it is already present today, I believe there are still improvements that could be made in order to boost its ability to predict college writing performance, increase its credibility in the eyes of admission officers and expand its usefulness to post-admission concerns.

To begin with, the writing section of the SAT should be longer, about 60 to 75 minutes. This would give the student time to write a more substantial essay that would be a better gauge of his writing ability. In fact, longer essays are more reflective of writing in college as papers are generally longer than the typical five paragraph essays in the 25-minute section. (In comparison, in the GCE ‘A’ Level Exam, the British equivalent of standardized testing, General Paper essay writing exams are an hour and a half long, with the average essay length of 500-700 words.) As reported by the Boston Globe, about 56% of the 1,000 four-year colleges disregard the writing score due to their belief that length is unduly rewarded and that there is a ‘formula’ to doing well for the 25-minute section (Wertheimer, 2007). Increasing the time and most probably the length of the essay would allow us to better differentiate various writing abilities, and address the criticism that longer essays tend to be scored higher. After an hour, essay length would be more comparable, and the difference will be more likely on the quality of points raised rather than the length. To further encourage quality writing, essays will be sent to colleges where they serve as admissions material as well as an advising resource for future writing program placements. If colleges possess their writings, students may be less inclined to supply factual errors in their essays or simply memorize a structure as what some skeptics charge. Hence an extended writing section allows better sieving of the students’ writing abilities, adding credibility to the test and becoming potentially useful for post-admission concerns.

Despite the writing section preceding the other sections, the anxiety pervading while writing the essay may hinder the student from performing his best. Coupled with the fact that this proposed change brings about a much longer writing section, the new writing section will still be administered with the SAT, although it should be conducted in the afternoon after the 9 other sections and a break. This would provide a better gauge of students’ writing abilities, with fewer variables that could have affected actual performance.

Furthermore, such a writing test would also call for a slight shift in prompt topics, from those that presently encourage more personal narratives to those that require a potentially more global perspective. One of the truths about the SAT is that it compels schools to structure their curriculum to better prepare students for the test. To take advantage of this, the prompts/questions could be more global in nature, and thus encouraging schools to increase their students’ exposure to international affairs. Although this type of questions (eg. Should richer countries always help poorer ones?) may be harder than the ones they currently have, this also indirectly promotes international education in schools. This is especially important in the 1950s, when Americans had to be cognizant of the new world order that arose after the world war. In this way, the SAT help shapes what are taught in schools and attempts to address one of the perceived weaknesses of American high school students: having inadequate knowledge about the world.

With such an inclusion of a writing section in the 1950s exam (and a revamp of the current writing section), some criticisms regarding its credibility and accuracy in predicting college performance will hopefully be addressed.