Lucky Us: The SAT, Take 2

The essay question, like so many things in life, divides people into two discrete camps: Those who view it with anxiety and a sense of doom, and those who see it as their only real chance of survival in school. If blessed with a certain facility for words, a student can often present limited, or even wrong, information in such a way that it seems insightful or creative.

These are the kids who often hand in plays or poetry as their final projects in classes where, perhaps, a footnoted research paper might be more appropriate--astronomy, say, or biology. The kids who might let a grade slip just a tad so they can pull all-nighters at the campus newspaper or magazine office. The kids who often wind up writing mid-list novels, doing time for fraud or working as reporters for city dailies.

Three weeks ago, the Trustees of the College Board voted to add an essay question to the SAT, which is used by many colleges and universities to evaluate applicants. For years, educators have debated the usefulness, and morality, of standardized testing, and though it remains a widespread requirement, it has gone through many modifications.

The most recent changes occurred after the University of California, the biggest client of the SAT, threatened to switch to another test. They include the new handwritten essay question, the deletion of a time-honored analogies section and questions on advanced algebra. College Board officials hope the new version will provide a more well-rounded evaluation of what a student knows and can comprehend, which is an admirable goal.

It’s just too bad it can’t have a grandfather clause. Hearing of the new writing section, many of us grown-ups were doused with a sense of frustrated vindication. As we had suspected for so long, the quiet desperation of our lives was indeed due to being ahead of our time. Had there been an essay question on the SAT in our day, no doubt we’d all be living the high life today.

And yet. How easy is it to write an essay under such circumstances even for those who love to write? Even for those who do it every day. In 20 to 30 minutes, with no computer, no helpful copy editor, no Google, no co-worker who actually knows how to spell “adjudicate.” Just you and that blue book and those No. 2 pencils with the clock gobbling up the minutes of your future, of your destiny, like a 5-year-old popping bubble wrap. No deadline extensions, no blaming it on AOL. What kind of prose could possibly come from conditions such as these?

Ten reporters from throughout this newspaper agreed to try to find out. They answered a question, provided by the College Board, similar to those that will be included in the new SATs. Conditions were as authentic as possible--in a stuffy silent room there were blue books and No. 2 pencils, there was a non-gum-chewing proctor (although I also took the test, which was probably cheating somehow) with a watch borrowed from a reliable source.

No one save the proctor knew the question until the clock began. The Trustees of the College Board said it would be a 20- to 30-minute exercise, so we compromised on 25, but the essay was the only part of the test we took, which certainly gave us an advantage over 11th-graders stuck in a classroom filling in bubbles for three hours. That and the fact that we write on deadline for a living.

The good news is we all passed. According to Tom Ewing at the Educational Testing Center, the two professional graders who read the essays were not told who had written them but caught on almost immediately (which wasn’t really hard since many essays made reference to journalistic careers or to the exercise itself. But even in those that didn’t, Ewing said, “it was pretty obvious that these were adults, and seasoned writers”).

Seasoned writing is apparently not always a good thing. Almost all of the participants chose to write narratives rather than academic analyses, which, one scorer noted, “made it difficult to judge the kind of verbal reasoning the writers might, or might not, have.” A “faux-ironic mocking tone,” they felt, permeated several of the essays. Furthermore, there was, according to Ewing, “an almost mechanical skill indicative of people who write for a living that made them less authentic.” Ouch.

Reporters’ Scores Come as a Relief

But as everyone who’s taken the SAT knows, the important thing is the score and most of us got perfect 6s. Which was a big relief, since the participants were not just risking public professional humiliation but also dancing with the ultimate anxiety dream--you know, the one in which you discover that your college degree and all subsequent achievement has mysteriously been rendered null and void and so you must repeat all of high school, often in your underwear.

Still, as our teachers always told us, there’s more to taking a test than the actual results, there’s the experience. And there were many notable facets to this experience. The extreme delight some editors expressed when they heard the plan, for instance, was a bit chilling and might have explained why many of the writers approached for the experiment, including several big-time award winners, demurred. (Many cited their original, and mostly very high, SAT scores as they declined, proving that even decades later, those numbers remain vivid, a benchmark.)

Oh, what a great idea, they said, but, gee, they had dentist appointments and kids that needed to be picked up, interviews and deadline editing, they had last-minute scheduling conflicts, some of them quite vague, some seemingly contradicted by bosses and colleagues.

“If I prove that I can write on that kind of a deadline,” one Pulitzer Prize-winner half-laughed into the phone, “my editors would expect me to do it all the time.” Others were more up front. “No way,” said one former reporter turned editor. When shown a bagful of books, he made a sign reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian peasants. “I don’t even want to see them,” he said, hurrying away into the mist.

Even those who proved game faltered a bit at the doorway when they saw that telltale baby blue. Who doesn’t have some grim memory of blue book hell? Of getting halfway through that honors French history final question only to realize you’ve spent the last 30 minutes writing about the wrong war? Or discovering moments after handing in your midterm that you were supposed to answer not two but three of the five questions listed? Those anxiety dreams do not come from nowhere.

When the time came for the journalists to turn over and read the question, groaned profanity weighted the air. For a few strained moments it seemed some would bolt, but no, grimly wrapping fingers around pencils, everyone went to it. Soon the only sound was sharp lead on paper and the sudden curt shush of an eraser.

Pages were angled and hunched over and smoothed and tapped impatiently. Chins were propped on hands, or tucked toward chests. Some of the writers, mostly the men, slumped back in their chairs, putting physical distance between themselves and the paper.

One woman rested her head on her arm as she wrote, staring at her words sideways. In 10 minutes, the grown-ups were gone and the students had slid into their places, guarding the test with their forearms or writing while staring into the middle distance as if the arm had no relationship to the eyes.

After 15 minutes, one of the men stood up and handed in his paper. “Different deadlines in sports,” T.J. Simers deadpanned as he left. But then there’s always one kid in class who has to turn his test in first.

The hardest thing was the actual writing, the reporters said after they were done. Although during an interview many take notes in longhand, rarely do they write a story using anything but a keyboard these days.

During the test, several shook out their writing hands, an unconscious gesture that everyone instantly remembered from those long-ago finals. Joe Mathews, an education reporter, said his arm hurt for days afterward. “They ought to let you ice it down,” he said. “Like an athlete.”

The amount of anxiety around the exercise surprised many of the participants. “Even with nothing at stake, it’s amazing how such tests still have the power to conjure long-dormant fears,” said Roy Rivenburg, who writes for Southern California Living. “Everything seems to move in slow motion--your brain, the pencil, your ability to read and comprehend a simple two-paragraph essay question.”

The dragonfly analogy was roundly denounced as an actual hindrance to creativity. “That was just so lame,” said P.J. Huffstutter, who writes for Business. “Why do SAT questions have to be so lame? I wasted time sitting there wondering this.”

Geoff Boucher, an entertainment reporter, was shocked to see how quickly he slid back into essay-speak. “That smarmy, earnest, eager-to-please voice I had on tests was right there,” he said, “even after all those years. That was pretty disturbing.”

Empathy for Young Test Takers

Many of us found it hard to turn in writing that hadn’t been edited; I worried about my lead, the opening paragraph, for the rest of the day. “The most important thing I’ve learned in journalism,” said Lorenza Munoz, an entertainment writer, “particularly since coming to features, is the role of rewriting and editing a story. I hated that I didn’t have time to go back and tinker around.”

“I gained new empathy for 18-year-old SAT takers,” said Dana Calvo, who also writes for Calendar, “realizing how crazy it is to respond to a provocative question within minutes after reading it. I had a much better essay mapped out in my mind later that night after mulling it over.”

All were giddy when they learned they did so well, although some of us were frankly surprised. My use of run-on sentences, fragments and double-dashes should have led to major points off. Not to mention the handwriting issue, portions of my and at least one other’s essay were all but illegible. As grateful as many of us might have been in our youth to see an essay question on our SATs, it’s difficult to imagine how standardized the scoring of an essay can really be. One look at any sort of review makes it clear that one critic’s idea of a masterpiece is another one’s turgid failure.

“How are they going to grade these, really?” Huffstutter wondered. “It is completely subjective. And can you imagine reading thousands of these? You would completely numb out.”

Many of the essays were stories, some personal, rather than scholarly discussions of the topic. Which, rather than signaling an inability to use verbal reasoning, as the scorers uncharitably feared, probably reflected what many have learned in this profession--that one person’s story, well told, can illuminate an issue in a way no amount of academic debate ever can.