Unpersuasive
"Is it more important to follow the rules exactly or to base your actions on how other people may be affected?"
"Are people motivated to achieve by personal satisfaction rather than by money or fame?"
Even if you don't have a high-school junior in your house, you may have guessed that these are sample topics for the essay portion of the ''new SAT.'' The recent debut of the tripartite SAT Reasoning Test -- the official name of the revised college entrance exam that now includes writing along with math and critical reading -- has not lacked for news media coverage. Already, the 25-minute persuasive essay has replaced the discarded analogies as the SAT's hot-button feature, but its significance has yet to be fully appreciated. By instructing students to champion their own points of view on the spot, the new requirement may well reveal less about their prose skills than about our take-no-prisoners culture of argument.
Ever since its postwar ascendancy, the SAT has stood as the pre-eminent symbol of the nation's educational values, and even its democratic virtues. The elevation of writing in the SAT hierarchy, a step up from its former status as one of many achievement-test subjects, is supposed to signal that effective communication skills matter in our global information age. It is also intended to convey a neo-sputnik message: teachable talents, not just the innate aptitude that the old math-verbal SAT claimed to measure, are at a premium in an ever more competitive world, so schools had better shape up. Nobody believes in a writing gene; the addition of the new writing component of the SAT (and harder math problems and more reading passages, too) shifts attention to the caliber of preparation and the quality of thinking going on in America's classrooms.
But the SAT essay, to say nothing of the controversy it has occasioned, might well make you wonder about the rhetorical and reasoning habits being peddled (and modeled) to students. Critics of the writing exercise have wasted no time in finding fault with its scoring methods and its ''formulaic and superficial'' approach to the craft. The National Council of Teachers of English, among others, condemns what it sees as a narrow equation between ''good writing'' and ''correct writing'' and laments that the essay requirement may squeeze self-expression out of the classroom. One director of undergraduate writing at M.I.T. has disparaged what he found to be a nearly direct correlation between an essay's length and its score. The more verbose, the better; content, he has suggested, is irrelevant.
These complaints are overblown. It would be surprising if essay length didn't correlate with scores, given that ''developing'' ideas is the point of the exercise. And surely prolixity isn't too great a temptation when there's so little time and only two pages to fill. As for fastidious usage, graders are in fact told not to be ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves''-style sticklers about what are, after all, rough drafts. The savvy Kaplan test-prep guide's advice to prospective essay writers is ''Don't stress yourself out worrying about grammar and punctuation if they are not your strongest skills.''
The real problem with the SAT persuasive essay assignment isn't what it conveys about spontaneity or style but what it suggests about how to argue. Students are asked to ponder (quickly) a short excerpt of conventional wisdom about, say, the advisability of following rules, and they are then instructed to ''develop your point of view on this issue.'' But if the goal of ''better writing'' is ''improved thinking,'' as the College Board's National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges has pronounced, perhaps it's worth asking whether practice in reflexively taking a position on any potentially polarizing issue is what aspiring college students -- or the rest of us -- need most.
As those sample essay questions at the start reveal, and as any test-prep book will confirm, at the homiletic heart of the SAT writing assignment is the false dichotomy. The best strategy for a successful essay is to buy into one of the facile premises that inform the question, and then try to sell it as if it were really yours. Essayists won't be penalized for including false information, either, according to the official guide for graders. ''You are scoring the writing,'' it instructs, ''and not the correctness of facts.''
False analogies, of course, were an old SAT staple, but at least test takers got credit for picking only the true one. By contrast, the test-prep industry bluntly says that a blinkered perspective pays off on the essay -- and nobody knows better than the professional SAT obsessives. ''It is very important that you take a firm stance in your essay and stick to it,'' insists Kaplan's ''New SAT.'' Practicing what it preaches, the prep book doesn't let go. ''You are not fair and balanced! (Well, you should be fair, but definitely not balanced.)'' Kaplan drives home the point yet again, just in case. ''What's important is that you take a position and state how you feel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.''
This doesn't bear much resemblance to an exercise in critical reasoning, which usually involves clarifying the logic of a position by taking counterarguments seriously or considering alternative assumptions. The English teachers may worry that in the rush to prepare for the SAT expository essay, personal writing will get short shrift in schools. In fact, self-centered opinion is exactly what the questions solicit. ''Don't panic and write from the opposing point of view'' is Kaplan's calming advice.
You have to hand it to the College Board: the new essay seems all too apt as training for contemporary social and political discourse in this country, and for journalistic food fights too. But don't colleges want to encourage the ''strengths of analysis and logic'' that the Board itself has said are so important to ''the citizenry in a democracy''? Out in the ever more competitive world, it is hard to communicate if the only side of an argument you can hear is your own.
Ann Hulbert hits it right on. A blinkered perspective, a take-no-prisoners approach, a fundamental false dichotomy -- these are among the LAST things that a "critical reasoning" test should be teaching.
I've some sympathy for questions like those. They can be useful exercises; they teach certain skills. In 4th grade, I had to write "3-point persuasive paragraphs." Around 7th grade, I had to do exercises almost exactly like those SAT questions. They are quite good at teaching you to select evidence and focus your argument.
But that's all they are. They're purposely artificial, rather like those exaggerated arm motions you do at the piano when you're trying to learn certain passages. By 11th grade, you should have gotten beyond such artificial constructs.
I think an argument can be made that this fits in nicely with the trivium concept. I'd have no problem seeing those questions on a 7th grade test; it's a perfect dialectic-stage prompt. It's great for the age when you're developing your "debating" skills and forms, and when such exaggerated exercises are valuable teaching tools. But it is condescending and embarrassing to a kid in the rhetoric stage, who has hopefully transitioned into a more mature and critically nuanced type of writing.
So seeing this on an SAT is rather troubling. As long as students are aware that this type of question is an artificial exercise, I'm fine with the idea. Even 11th graders can benefit from a bit of review in argument format. But if this sort of essay becomes seen as the ultimate goal of writing, I start having some serious problems.
Will teachers, under pressure to prepare students for the SAT, take the time to emphasize this distinction between exercise and ultimate goal? Forgive me for being pessimistic and cynical. They'll want students to do well on the test, and they'll spend a good deal of time drilling the type of writing that prepares students for the test. Implicitly or explicitly, aggressively partisan writing will get priority over training in nuance and balance. For good or for ill, exams like the SAT have the power to set the standards for what is taught and emphasized. In this case, I'm not liking the emphasis.
I would hate to answer questions like those in the article. Just look at the first one. Not only is it a false dichotomy, but it's also a horridly leading question. Who is going to argue that you should "follow the rules exactly" instead of "basing your actions on how other people may be affected?" Just to be obstinate and contrary, I would have been quite tempted to start arguing for the legalistic side, even though I'd have to have MUCH better arguments than if I argued for situational ethics. I would also be tempted to spend the whole essay pointing out that the question was leading and presented a false dichotomy.
However, as I am more motivated by money in this case (college scholarships!) than by personal satisfaction and principles, I would instead wince and give them sort of answer they wanted.
All and all, I'm not looking forward to more generations of students primed to the principles of blinkered, one-sided argumentation. Not that I'm not faulty myself; you should see some of my high school papers, and the Constitution papers I rolled out this semester! But I'd like to think that we were headed away from that sort of thing, not toward it.
