Cburell's Favorite Links on ets from Diigo

How much do college admissions essays matter? - USATODAY.com

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:19:44 -0000

Good general advice.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

TIPS FOR STUDENTS, PARENTS TO IMPROVE THEIR CHANCES

The selective college admission process has been compared to a lottery, but Elizabeth Wissner-Gross, a college admission packager in the ultra-competitive Great Neck area of Long Island, N.Y., doesn't see it that way.

"I think there are specific things you can do to get into the college of your choice," she says. Her sons, Alex and Zachary, both made the All-USA High School Academic Team, among a long list of accolades.

How much does the essay really matter?

"Applicants and their families have somewhat of a belief in the redemptive value of the essay," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "It's an urban myth that a student who has goofed off his whole academic career can get in with a come-from-behind epic struggle in which the essay serves as the primary tool."

"It's not a substitute for a rigorous curriculum, good grades and evidence that you're going to do well," he said.

Still, the essay can make a difference.

At the University of Virginia, Parke Muth, the associate dean of admissions, talks about the "10 percent rule."

"If you have 18- or 20,000 applicants, for some of those students, the essay makes a huge difference, both positively and negatively," he said.

Admissions counselors at the University of Virginia read every essay looking for the student's voice.

Exactly: VOICE (last line). posted by cburell

They range from how to help kids cram for the SATs (play hooky to study together the day before the test) to how to ferret out undersubscribed majors at a dream school (chat up a department secretary).

Interesting angle, the undersubscribed majors. posted by cburell

But getting kids into that dream college starts with raising kids who'll be a college's dream candidate. Parents have to find and create opportunities for kids to develop their interests from a very early age rather than leaving it to the schools, Wissner-Gross says.

The first challenge for the writer: picking a topic.

Any topic can work — or fail, Muth said.

"It shouldn't be an essay about community service. It should be about a moment of time," he said. "Start writing an essay about John who you met at a homeless shelter who talked to you about his life. Like any piece of good writing, then you're going to make that come alive.

The biggest problem for students, he said, is starting with too wide a focus. "By the time they get to the details, they run out of space," he said. "I'm all for cutting to the chase."

She recommends monitoring all class work to check the teachers' math against their own formulas.

Hilary Brandenburg, who will attend New York University in the fall, wrote about her summer internship at fashion house Liz Claiborne in New York. "I used my experience as a way to frame myself and what I was interested in studying at the schools that I applied to," said Brandenburg, 18, of Washington, D.C.

"I had a lot of different topics I started," she said. "At school we were told to come up with a list of anything we thought would be interesting about ourselves. We went through a lot of workshops and they gave us prompts and then we had to think about ourselves."

She said her internship "was the easiest thing for me to write."

Brandenburg said her biggest frustration was keeping within the word limit. "In the end, it helped me refine what I wanted to say and it became more to the point," she said.

• Organization. Rather than berating or belittling your kid for not being organized, Wissner-Gross recommends secretly organizing them. "If we set an example and show them, teach them, then they know a system, and kids take that with them to college."

Muth advises students to read their completed essays to their best friend. If it sounds like them, they've probably done a good job, he said. "If it sounds like a Ph.D. thesis, it's probably not their voice, the voice we're looking for."

It's OK to seek feedback from a couple of people, he said, but don't overdo it.

"I think increasingly we're seeing essays by committee," he said. "They've written a draft for their high school English class. Then their high school counselor looks it over, Mom looks it over and Dad looks it over and a friend. By the time it goes through that many people, the life is out of it."

Good advice. posted by cburell

Then there are those who seek assistance from professional counselors or the essay companies that have cropped up.

Nassirian said college admissions officers have become good at "detecting paid embellishments" to essays.

A good writing coach would be invisible by not helping "embellish," but helping cut to the voice of the writer. posted by cburell

She said company counselors know what admissions officers are seeking and how to "elaborate the achievements and strengthen the grammar, context and content of the essays, so that they stand out apart from the numbers and details of their application."

College-Admission-Essay.com charges students $199 to have a professional writer edit a 500-word essay. For services from a counselor, the company charges $150 per hour, with discounts for multiple hours. The counselors also provide general college counseling.

Quite a business. Lordy. posted by cburell

Tags: sat writing ets seocho

Posted by: cburell

SAT-ACT Conversion chart

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:25:24 -0000

Converting raw scores to SAT scores. Good :)

Tags: seocho ets assessment

Posted by: cburell

How the Essay is Scored: College Board SAT Essay Rubric

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:06:03 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The essay will be scored by experienced and trained high school and college teachers. Each essay will be scored by two people who won't know each other's score. They won't know the student's identity or school either. Each reader will give the essay a score from 1 to 6 (6 is the highest score) based on the following scoring guide.

Please note that the essay images seen by readers for scoring purposes are clearer than the images we can display for students and institutions on our website.

SCORE OF 6

An essay in this category demonstrates clear and consistent mastery, although it may have a few minor errors. A typical essay

effectively and insightfully develops a point of view on the issue and demonstrates outstanding critical thinking, using clearly appropriate examples, reasons, and other evidence to support its position
is well organized and clearly focused, demonstrating clear coherence and smooth progression of ideas
exhibits skillful use of language, using a varied, accurate, and apt vocabulary
demonstrates meaningful variety in sentence structure
is free of most errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics

Tags: ets seocho rubric

Posted by: cburell

College Board Announces Scores for New SAT® with Writing Section

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:32:35 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Females outscored males on the writing section, which consists of a multiple-choice portion and an essay. The average writing score for all was 497. Females scored an average of 502, 11 points higher than males, who scored an average of 491. A stronger female performance in writing was evident across every racial/ethnic group.

Mathematics scores dipped by 2 points to 518, returning to the level of two years ago. Both male and female mathematics scores declined by 2 points to 536 and 502, respectively.

Average critical reading scores decreased 5 points to 503. The critical reading score decline was more pronounced among males. Male scores declined by 8 points to 505; female scores by 3 points to 502.

Subgroup Differences in Mathematics, Critical Reading, and Writing

ESL: Students for whom English is a second language increased 5 points in critical reading to 467 and 2 points in mathematics to 523. They scored 469 on the writing section. Although this is 28 points below the mean for all students, it is a smaller gap than these students experienced for critical reading. More ESL students took the SAT this year.

Race/Ethnicity: African American and Mexican American critical reading scores, 434 and 454 respectively, improved over last year by one point each. American Indian mathematics scores improved by 1 point to 494 and Mexican American mathematics scores improved over last year by 2 points to 465. The largest declines in critical reading were seen among White and Other Hispanic students, both down by 5 points to 527 and 458, respectively.

Student Performance on Essay

The essay asked students to respond to a point of view on an issue through an original first-draft format and support a position with reasoning and examples taken from reading, studies, experience, or observations. Two readers scored each essay, each reader providing a score from 1 to 6 for a maximum score of 12. The average essay score was 7.2 out of 12. Reader agreement on essay scores was very high. Nearly 97 percent of readers exactly agreed on scores or differed by only one point. Only 3 percent of essays needed to be resolved by a third reader. The College Board performed analyses on 6,498 essays randomly sampled from the March 2005 through January 2006 SAT administrations. Results demonstrated that longer essays were more likely to receive higher scores; however, the relationship between length and score was only moderate (.62). Eighty-four percent of essay responses reached the second page. Half the essays used the first-person voice. Score differences were slight, with first-person-voice essays averaging a score of 6.9, compared to 7.2 for those not using first-person voice. Only 8 percent of essays were identified as using the typical five-paragraph essay structure. Fifty-three percent of essays used academic examples (historical, literary/art/music, science or technology, and current events or politics) and 52 percent of essays included some type of personal experience as supporting evidence. Some students used both types of examples.

Tags: ets seocho

Posted by: cburell

Comments from the College Board on SAT Essay Length and Scores

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:27:38 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Given that, some have wondered why the SAT essay training and practice test samples typically show high correlations between length and score.

There is a simple explanation for this correlation. The College Board's goal in selecting samples for initial training, and for practice tests, is to find essays at each score point that demonstrate all the criteria of that score point. And one important criterion is development. According to our published Scoring Guide, a "typical" 6 essay "effectively and insightfully develops a point of view on the issue... using clearly appropriate examples, reasons, and other evidence to support its position." These essays tend to be robustly developed, and are among the longest essays in our sample sets. But a "typical" 6 essay also "exhibits skillful use of language," "demonstrates meaningful variety in sentence structure," and "is free of most errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics." Training 6s are usually longer than training essays at other score points, but they are also more skillfully written across the entire range of criteria than essays at other score points.

Compare a training 6 to a training 3. An essay selected as a sample 3 will be "limited in its organization or focus, or may demonstrate some lapses in coherence or progression of ideas"; it will have problems in development, which, in practice, almost always means that it is shorter. But sample 3s also "sometimes use weak vocabulary or inappropriate word choice," "lack variety or demonstrate problems in sentence structure," or "contain an accumulation of errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics." Training 3s are often shorter than training 4s, 5s, and 6s, but they are also problematic in other ways that all readers should recognize.

The College Board selects these typical essays for training because we want teachers and students to be clear about the level of quality that we associate with each score point. In live scoring, of course, we see typical and atypical essays; some shorter essays will still "insightfully and effectively develop a point of view on an issue," while some longer essays will "sometimes use weak vocabulary or inappropriate word choice." But that is the reason the College Board only employs experienced classroom teachers (with a minimum of three years' experience) as scorers. We trust that teachers who have years of experience reading student writing will be able, upon grasping the clear distinctions between typical essays, to perform the trickier task of scoring the atypical essays. Results from the March administration suggest that our confidence is justified.

Tags: ets seocho

Posted by: cburell

Testing, testing - Page 2 - Salon.com

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:22:58 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

SAT coaches don't necessarily have the same conscience issues as some teachers. "What we recommend is that you memorize the basic essay formula and a couple of facts about a topic you're interested in, so that you pretty much know what you're going to write before you take the test," says Yale sophomore-to-be Janet Xu, guest editor of the latest edition of the SAT guide "Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to The SAT." "This works because the SAT questions are usually very broad."

Indeed. An SAT coach based in Rochester, N.Y., who works for one of the major test-prep outfits and didn't want to be named, recently took the new test himself to see what he was up against. "I was like, OK, I know all about 'The Scarlet Letter,' I know all about Florence Nightingale, I know all about the tsunami," he says. "The essay question was something like, Does work give life meaning? So, Florence Nightingale, her work was to heal people -- that gives life meaning. The tsunami, the rescue efforts showed the meaning of volunteer work. 'The Scarlet Letter' -- I'm sure there was some work in there somewhere ... OK, the work of retribution gave Hester Prynne's life meaning. If you have examples of anything, you can write any essay," he says. "And you can always use Florence Nightingale, no matter what."

Tags: ets seocho

Posted by: cburell

SAT The Essay

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:21:17 -0000

College Board's official advice for the SAT essay.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

It seems like everybody has a different opinion about how to do well on the SAT essay. Some people say you should write a strict five-paragraph essay, with an introduction, a conclusion, and three specific examples. Some people say you should read well-known books like The Great Gatsby or The Scarlet Letter and refer to them as often as you can. Some people say that the real key is to write as much as humanly possible. Some say you should do all of these at once!

We want students to know that there are no short cuts to success on the SAT essay. The high school and college teachers who will score your essay have seen it all before. These teachers are not going to give high scores to an essay just because it is long, or has five paragraphs, or uses literary examples. The scorers are experts at identifying truly good writing--essays that insightfully develop a point of view with appropriate reasons and examples and use language skillfully.

So what can you do to write a successful SAT essay? Here are some strategies the College Board would like you to consider:

Read the entire assignment. It's all there to help you. Every essay assignment contains a short paragraph about the issue, usually from a specific author or book. Don't ignore this important information in your rush to answer the question. Imagine that you are talking to the author of the paragraph about the issue. What would you say to him or her? Would you argue or agree? What other ideas or examples would you bring up? Answering these questions will help you develop your own point of view.

Don't oversimplify. Developing your point of view doesn't mean coming up with as many examples as you can. Sometimes students cut a great example short to move on to something else, and end up oversimplifying. Take the time to really explain an example; that's the best way to fully develop your point of view. An essay with one or two thoughtful, well-developed reasons or examples is more likely to get a high score than an essay with three short, simplistic examples.

There's nothing wrong with "I." You are asked to develop your point of view on the issue, not give a straight report of the facts. This is your opinion, so feel free to use "I," and give examples that are meaningful to you, even ones from your personal life or experiences. Of course you need to support your ideas appropriately, and show that you can use language well, but remember: the essay is an opportunity for you to say what you think about an important issue that's relevant to your life. So relax and be yourself, and you will do just fine.

Tags: ets seocho writing

Posted by: cburell

Fooling the College Board :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:15:41 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ideally, English teachers would all have small class sizes (20-25 students), an extra prep period for grading, and extra time for collaboration and professional development. However, since English teachers are a dime a dozen, when one burns out there’s another young, eager one waiting to take his or her place, and the cycle of inexperience begins anew.

La Maestra, at 1:45 pm EDT on April 1, 2007

Exploited

You can tell how horribly oppressed and exploited we are by noting how La Maestra thinks 20-25 students is a “small” class size! Hegemony at its finest.

Ted Silar, Albright College, at 6:21 pm EDT on April 8, 2007

Tags: ets writing seocho

Posted by: cburell

Testing, testing - Salon.com

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:50:14 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

As it turns out, some students who took the test on May 7 did not feel entirely unprepared. "On the way to the test we had just heard about the MIT study that connected the length of the essay to the scores," says Emily Rackleff, a junior at Newport High School in Newport, Ore. "So we all tried to write as much as possible."

This "MIT study" is actually a series of calculations made by Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at MIT who has developed and administered holistically graded writing tests for 25 years. (Full disclosure: He's also been a family friend for at least that long.) Perelman, along with the National Council of Teachers of English, has concluded that the new essay section, contrary to the College Board's intentions, is not only a lousy test of -- but also a threat to -- students' writing skills.

While attending a recent panel on the new SAT, Perelman, acting on a hunch, reviewed more than 50 sample essays that the College Board had made public for students and graders. He ran some numbers ("because I am from MIT and that is what we do," he says) and found a striking correlation between the length of the essays and their score. (For scoring, each of two graders gives a separate rank of 1 to 6, for a maximum total of 12.) "If you just looked at length and nothing else, you could be right in predicting the score over 90 percent of the time," he says. (To prove his point, he even guessed the scores of sample essays just by gauging their length without reading them. He was 10 for 10.)

Perelman was also dismayed to learn that the College Board, which administers the SAT, has explicitly said -- on the grounds that it is testing writing, not historical, literary, or scientific knowledge -- that factual references in the essays needn't be correct. If you misstate the date of the War of 1812, for example, the readers won't mark you down.

"To write something that's long and has the appearance of having a sound, detailed argument but really doesn't make much sense: There is a term for that," Perelman says delicately. And that is what is being rewarded."

Perelman cites one of the sample essays the College Board provides for grader-training purposes: a composition that uses "Madame Bovary" as an example of the dangers of secrecy. It's not awful, but it does include sentences such as "If secrecy were eradicated, many problems, such as internal division, but also possibly hate, might also be eliminated." On the 1 to 6 scale, it serves as an example to scorers of a perfect 6.

ne might wonder, therefore, why people are getting so worked up over 25 minutes -- or about 500 words -- of a high school junior's life. After all, the essay winds up counting for only a small portion of the total score -- and many colleges are saying that at least for now, it's not about to make or break a student's chances. In fact, only 429 of about 1,600 four-year colleges have officially informed the College Board that they'll require writing scores. Still, since 80 percent of colleges require the SAT for admissions, the real question is how they'll use the new scores. "It'll be beneficial to consider the essay as part of a holistic review of a student," says Mark Hatch, vice president for Enrollment Management at Colorado College. "But it's not something that colleges will be eager to integrate into their academic ranking system right away. We need to study it first."

"By putting writing on the SAT, we believed we'd focus more attention on writing in schools from K through 12 and across the curriculum," she says. But it's the wrong kind of attention, say critics. "You're getting teachers to train students to be bad writers," Perelman says. The specter of the essay, he claims, could have a chilling effect on the learning and teaching of writing in high school, encouraging students only to perfect the art of the formulaic (to say nothing of wordy) five-paragraph "write for the teacher" essay.

"The SAT carries such weight that teachers will feel pressured to teach to the test: to help students prepare for the very specific kind of writing that the SAT asks them to do," says Bob Yagelski, associate professor of English at SUNY Albany and chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Task Force on the SAT and ACT writing tests. In fact, in a recent report, the NCTE charged that the SAT's essay test threatens to "compromise student writers and undermine longstanding efforts to improve writing instruction in the nation's schools."

At very least, English teachers say, the essay puts them in a tricky position. "The purpose of academic writing is to get kids to think deeply and explore ideas in as broad a way as possible, to find an authentic voice," says the head of the English department of a suburban Boston high school, who did not want to be identified. "But with 25 minutes to write, they're not thinking broadly. They're thinking, 'Follow the formula.' We could tell students, 'OK, this is just what you do when you take the SAT. Normally we ask you to be broad and deep and thoughtful, but for this particular test you need to go in with this narrow approach' -- well, that makes us hypocrites."

Tags: ets seocho

Posted by: cburell

Coaching and Lasting Out New SAT :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:15:02 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

At the board’s annual meeting Friday, officials admitted that the new writing test — a key part of the new and expanded SAT — is coachable, with significant gains possible for those who would otherwise receive low scores.

the new writing test — a key part of the new and expanded SAT — is coachable, with significant gains possible for those who would otherwise receive low scores.

The site repeats past statements that many students who are coached show little or no gain, and says that some testing companies — which the board does not name — are hurting students by telling them to memorize an essay that they can write down regardless of the essay question. This is bad advice and will hurt students, the board says.

But at the board’s annual meeting, Wayne Camara, vice president for research and analysis of the College Board, described research that recently found that coaching — even short-term coaching — does have a major impact on those with poor writing skills. For the research, six graduate students were assigned to put together a coaching program by signing up for a bunch of coaching services, and then developing a coaching program based on what they had learned.

A group of college freshmen were then divided in two: One group went through a nine-hour coaching program led by the graduate students and the other students were the control group. The students took the writing test before and after the coaching, and the coaching had a significant impact on those who did poorly the first time around — increasing their scores by an average of 3 points on the 12-point scale used on the essay.

Camara also said that the study had the students write two essays that are of the sort that college freshmen actually write (not the timed essay with prompt that is on the SAT). Coached students who were poor writers at the beginning did better on the actual essays and not just the SAT, Camara said. As a result, he characterized the coaching for the writing test as “not a bad thing,” in contrast to other coaching, which he said is more likely to teach test-taking skills than meaningful knowledge.

Lutz said that the Princeton Review commissioned a third party study on this that won’t be out until next year, but that all the evidence he is seeing from Princeton Review counselors suggests that the new writing test “may be the most coachable portion of the SAT.”

He echoed the views of many college officials who have decided not to use the writing test in saying that its approach is flawed. “It’s a bad way to measure writing skills — a 25-minute essay on an esoteric subject.”

Many of the SAT essay questions are philosophical in nature — the debut question, for example, was on whether majority rule is always right — and some think that the nature of the prompts contributes to their coachability as students are taught a mix of tactics to formulate good essays.

The board compared the rates at which students provide incorrect answers or skip questions — and those rates are constant throughout the test. If fatigue was causing problems, Camara said, the rates wouldn’t have stayed constant.

The SAT is considering letting people who take the test multiple times select only one part to take again, he said. For students who take the SAT more than once, many colleges allow students to take the highest score they received on each part of the SAT, so a student may be evaluated on a mathematics score from one day she took the test and the critical reading score from another day.

Tags: ets seocho assessment

Posted by: cburell

The New SAT: Longer, but No Better? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:41:57 -0000

“The writing test is teaching students a lot of bad habits,” said Perelman. “It’s real predictive value, in terms of writing, is nil.”

Tags: writing sat ets seocho

Posted by: cburell

The Yale Herald - November 14, 2003 - Ace it with PACE: Making testing actually matter

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:14:56 -0000

Tags: ets assessment seocho

Posted by: cburell

What's wrong with college admissions

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:11:45 -0000

Tags: ets assessment seocho

Posted by: cburell

USATODAY.com - Yale psychologist designs test, a challenger to the SAT

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:54:51 -0000

Tags: ets assessment seocho education

Posted by: cburell

Choosing Students: Higher Education ... - Google Book Search

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:52:19 -0000

Google Book Search chapter about Rainbow "Successful Intelligence" test being floated to supplement SAT. Creativite, Practical, and Analytical intelligences tested. I'm ambivalent.

Tags: assessment ets seocho

Posted by: cburell