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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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.”