Dana on the predictive ability of the writing portion of the SAT:
I'm a bit surprised the SAT essay section has proven to be so predictive. The topics students are asked to write about on the exam do not at all reflect the typical college assignment. The SAT prompts personal essays on broad, amorphous topics, not exercises in building an argument through carefully engaging with competing evidence....
But most students will write about friendships, relationships on athletic teams, and other examples of loyalty in their personal lives. If they do so grammatically, include an introduction and conclusion, and begin their paragraphs with topic sentences, they will potentially ace this section of the exam. The sad fact is, most American high school students can't do even that. And that's not a problem, of course, that can be solved at the college level.
I guess that I'm not so surprised. As a teacher of college courses which do not focus on learning the basic skills of writing (the grammar, introduction, conclusion, etc) but that nevertheless include a significant writing component, I can say that argument building and engagement with competing evidence is *much* easier to teach than those basics. Students who have a mastery of how to put an understandable essay together have an enormous advantage over those who don't. Even professors who don't spend their time painting student papers with red ink because of grammatical problems will typically swoon over an essay that's understandable, even if fails to grapple some of the major analytic points. Indeed, while I enjoy teaching undergraduate courses, one of the nicest things about working in a graduate program is that nearly all of the students can string together sentences and paragraphs.
--Robert Farley
