Chris Correa offers up a nice compendium of reactions to, and analysis of, the new SAT with a 25 minute essay section.
Among the articles he references is this editorial from the New York Times which questions the value of dropping analogies in favor of a 25 minute essay:
We are living in the age of the false, and often shameless, analogy. A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a new documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” Kenneth Lay compares attacks on his company to the terrorist attacks on the United States.
Intentionally misleading comparisons are becoming the dominant mode of public discourse. The ability to tell true analogies from false ones has never been more important. But to make room for the new essay portion of the SAT that was rolled out this weekend with much fanfare, the College Board has unceremoniously dropped the test’s analogy questions, saying blandly that analogical reasoning will still be assessed “in the short and long reading passages.”
The funniest part of Chris’s post was when he linked to this Seattle Times report which highlighted the requirement of the essay being written in cursive, not in print:
“We were all laughing,” Jenkins said. “Most high-school students do not remember cursive. We learned it in fourth or fifth grade and have not been required to use it. This was definitely the hardest thing on the test!”
Seeing how we’re entering the Age of the Blog perhaps it is appropriate that students write a 25 minute essay on something they know absolutely nothing about.
Posted by TangoMan at 07:25 PM