Fooling the College Board :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Educa...

The essay is harming students, Perelman said, because it rewards formulaic writing that views the world as black and white, isn’t based on any facts, and values a few fancy vocabulary words over sincerity. He also said that while most college instructors work to “deprogram” students from the infamous “five paragraph essay” they learned in high school, the SAT test reinforces that approach. Perelman and others noted that the problem isn’t limited to the time students spend actually taking the SAT, but that many students devote months or years of study with coaching services to learning how to write the way the College Board wants — and with students fearful that a poor score will hurt their chances of college admission, they focus on that kind of writing.

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I have worked scoring essays ETS. Get real. The above essay gets a high score because you should see the rest of them.

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I too grade for the ETS in HIstory AP courses. My experience is that the essay portions of these AP exams reward students for jumping though hoops, but not for good writing or critical thinking. The students who do well memorize rubrics. The students who do poorly never had a teacher who gave them the rubric. The best essays rarely received the highest scores.

I *hope* others’ experience has been different.

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Overall, I thought the experience reading the essays helped me quite a bit with my AP classes. Oh, by the way, I’m still trying to get my students to abandon the three-pronged thesis, which is the spiritual handmaiden of the five paragraph essay. I liken these devices to training wheels and leg weights.

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I’m a high school English teacher. I teach six periods of English a day. I have 150 students. From about the age of 4 until my final year in college, I read 3-7 books per week, sometimes more. I’ve been teaching for six years, and I’m ashamed to say that if I thought hard about it, I could probably make a list of all of the books I’ve read this school year. I don’t have time to read, and frankly, I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm for reading.

That’s something that I, a lifelong bookworm, never thought I’d say, but it’s true. I don’t enjoy reading and I don’t enjoy writing—it’s somehow been totally wrung out of me. I’m currently looking for a way out of teaching English, because I want my old enjoyments back. I’m tired of the pressure of trying to reform years of bad writing habits, facing pressure to get my students to perform well on the state tests, exit exam, SAT, AP, and be prepared for college-level writing. I’m tired of people looking at us and questioning why we are failing as English teachers, when students come to me in the 9th grade as college-prep students and still have trouble with basic homonyms and sentence structure, and what’s worse, have no motivation to improve.

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For the last essay my students turned in, I gave them five days in class to write it. I gave them the outline I wanted them to use. We discussed the topic extensively in class. I gave them a rubric. 50% of my students bothered to turn the essay in, and of that 50%, the average score was a 50%. I gave them the option to rewrite and resubmit it for a higher score (I also made extensive comments on their essay and gave them two class days to work on the rewrite.) Of that 50% that turned in the original essay, only one in three chose to rewrite and resubmit their essay—the rest chose to stick with their original score.

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Something else Mary needs to keep in mind is that often, K-8 teachers have had NO formal teaching in writing outside of random workshops. In California, K-8 teachers only need a general degree in elementary education in order to teach—it isn’t until the 9th grade that English teachers must have an English degree and/or subject competency in order to teach English.

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Highlighted by cburell