Surely Two Choices is Enough
Let’s test our writing skills, shall we? Let’s write an essay on one of these questions:
“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?”
Okay let’s not. Let’s instead curl a lip at the stupid impoverished vacuous questions, and do something else instead. For instance we could wonder why those are the only possibilities on offer, and why the terms are so undefined, in fact meaningless. ‘More important’ – to whom, when, where, in what context? What ‘rules’? Rules pertaining to what? Football? Taking an aptitude test? Morality? If the latter, what rules are meant? What ‘actions’? What am I doing, and what rules apply to what I’m doing, and how do I know, and who issued them? Where are we? What ‘other people’? ‘Affected’ in what sense? To ‘achieve’ what? What kind of achievement are we talking about? What kind of ‘personal satisfaction’? What if ‘money’ and ‘fame’ aren’t real options? Where (again) are we? And why such incomplete choices? The best answer to both questions would be simply ‘No.’
The author of the article points this out.
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.”
Ah. The point of the test is to score how closely students resemble Bill O’Reilly. Wonderful.
…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.”…”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…In fact, self-centered opinion is exactly what the questions solicit…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”?
It doesn’t appear so.
I really don’t understand what Ann Hulbert is getting worked up about here. For example, why wouldn’t her NYT article itself be a good example of how to answer the question? There’s no obligation to “buy into one of the facile premises that inform the question” – that’s just an unwarranted assumption. Attack the false dichotomy in the question if you believe there is one – it’s not against the rules.
Hmm. It may not be against the rules – but perhaps it’s not good for one’s score? That’s what Hulbert says the SAT coaching people say, at least, and they probably know – that’s what people pay them for.
I don’t know, though, that’s just what I gather from the article.
(And then – it’s not against the rules, but it doesn’t straighforwardly ‘answer the question’ – and doing exactly that, as literally as possible, may well be part of what the testers grade on. That would be my guess. I grew up in Princeton, ETS was just down the road, and we were always taking those tests – guinea pigs, we were.)
If this is what teaching content is about then maybe there’s something in Stanley Fish’s argument after all?
See
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?ei=5070&en=bd5d960dada6b6d9&ex=1118203200&pagewanted=print
“It’s not important what other people might think, just what you think” does not, by default, rule out considering counterarguments. Stating what you think about potential weaknesses in your own argument is, in itself, classic critical reasoning.
What the author does not seem to acknowledge is that these instructions are prepared for children, and often children who may not have faced this type of question before. Very few children have experience in critical reasoning and thus may initially doubt their own abilities when presented with this situation. This instruction is not a limitation on content, it’s an encouragement for a potentially insecure writer to remove some of the limits and stretch the bounds of their own thinking.
By refusing to acknowledge the psychology of the test’s target audience, this author is guilty of the same type of narrow-minded approach to thinking for which she criticizes the test writers (and test-prep industry) in the first place.
Children? Students take the SAT at 17 and 18, don’t they? They’re not 6.
And if they don’t have experience of critical reasoning, that must be because it isn’t taught. It could be taught – couldn’t it?
‘”It’s not important what other people might think, just what you think” does not, by default, rule out considering counterarguments. Stating what you think about potential weaknesses in your own argument is, in itself, classic critical reasoning.’
It may not rule it out, but it certainly seems to discourage it, and quite strongly. And what is classic critical reasoning isn’t really the issue if that’s not what students are being told – is it?
Actually, there was research recently which showed a VERY strong correlation between length and score on the essays. In other words, not only is it bad writing practice and bad thinking, but they don’t even CARE what’s in the essays. No wonder they put so little thought into the questions.
As an English teacher of 34 years to mostly younger students in two countries other than the USA,I’d say that it’s much easier for mediocre students to construct and organise one-sided arguments than to present more complex perspectives.
Students who are ambivalent about an issue often come unstuck, especially in exam conditions, when they try and develop on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand arguments, often presenting opposing viewpoints and evidence without any attempt at evaluating their relative worth, or mixing the for-and-against arguments confusingly.
However, it is usually a pleasure to read students’ work which rises above the one-eyed approach and I try to allow for the greater difficulty of this writing in my marks.
Jonathan Dresner appears to criticise the length-mark correlation. I don’t know the details here, but as a VERY loose generalisation, it takes more rather than fewer words to substantiate and adequately explicate propositions. Still, there is a temptation as a marker to confuse quantity and quality.
“Students who are ambivalent about an issue often come unstuck, especially in exam conditions, when they try and develop on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand arguments, often presenting opposing viewpoints and evidence without any attempt at evaluating their relative worth, or mixing the for-and-against arguments confusingly.”
I believe there was some study done that suggested the reason women got less firsts than men (at, I think, Oxford) was because they were less keen on strident single point of view arguments, and more inclined to putting a balanced point of view.
Maybe markers are just more impressed by people arguing a single side of an argument because it is easier for them?