<p>After going through these threads and seeing all of the odd numbered essay grades, it only made me realize how flawed the essay grading process is. The fact that two graders consistantly disagree almost as often as they agree is a little disturbing. It’s out of SIX! How hard can it be to get the correct number? College Board provides a rubric for grading and by that rubric, there should only be ONE correct score per essay. I realize that this can occasionally happen, but it shouldn’t happen as often as it does. All of the graders took grading “classes” right? I think College Board might need to reassess the process (especially when one point difference on the essay can mean as much as 30 points).</p>
<p>No one is going to answer? Interesting… I figured some people would agree because they hate College Board and others would disagree because essay grading can be so subjective (a valid point, by the way). Someone?</p>
<p>Well yeah its naturally flawed. So is the SAT itself, nothing you can really do about it.</p>
<p>I agree. Essay’s are so inherently subjective that is impossible to assign a quantitative value to it. Due to do so, would be like applying a number to every book ever published for a rate of comparison. </p>
<p>But then again, is the whole SAT test as a whole the same exact thing. It is not a number that is assigned to you that in reality does not measure anything? And what exactly is “insight”? That term is loose and ambiguous that it can mean a million different things to a million different people. </p>
<p>But yes your are right, if the SAT was infallible and the perfect test, all essay scores would consist of even numbers.</p>
<p>I don’t think the sat is as flawed as the essay is. No way. For all the multiple choice questions, there are clear cut answers every time. It’s not the least bit subjective (as much as the non-800 CR people want to say it is). The rest of the test is straight forward, it’s just the grading of the essay that is a little “off”.</p>
<p>i have a feeling that its not two separate graders giving a grade without knowing what the other grader gave the essay. I think two people sit down and discuss. If they think the paper is almost up to 6 standards but not quiet but better than a 5. They could give it a 11</p>
<p>No the SAT essays are graded at the Graders home, via internet, check out Pearson Education Management help wanted ads. They are SOOOO in need of essay graders, probably taking people off the street. come on 500,000 essays, you think two people are sitting down “talking” bout these essays and discussing them, no way.</p>
<p>The essay grading process is the one aspect of the SAT that I believe is most in need of improvement. I suspect that an average reader spends at most a minute on each essay, speed-reading it (or speed-reading half of it), and assigns a score based on a very quick and superficial impression. The two readers’ scores cannot disagree by more than one point, but this is actually not as difficult as one may think. If both readers are equally incompetent or unqualified, one can easily imagine a scenario in which the two readers give 3 and 4 to a perfectly good essay that really should have earned an 11 or 12. Consistency does not imply precision. The graders can be consistent in their erroneous assessments of essays; one can easily be consistently bad at performing a certain task. For example, two graders may favor length as a criterion for a 6 essay. They can consistently score every essay that is a full two pages a 6 without necessarily reading most of the essay. And, when an essay comes in that should be scored a 6 but is only a little more than a page and a half, both readers may decide that it’s a 5, or a 5 and 4, or, worse yet, 4 and 4. Thus, a 12 essay now becomes a 9 (or possibly an 8), which means a loss of about 50 points on the 800 scale. And this occurs probably on a frequent basis. I believe that many essays are assigned scores (on a scale of 2 to 12) that are as much as 3-4 points off from their “true” scores. That means that some essays that are scored a 12 are actually 9s, and some 9s are actually 12s. Scary thought. While it’s true that 12s are quite rare, that does not mean that these scores are assigned accurately. I can spin a wheel to assign scores to essays to ensure that less than 1% of the essays receive 12s, but that doesn’t lend any more validity to the scores.</p>
<p>My proposal to reform the essay scoring process is to have 3 to 4 readers read each essay. Let’s assume that 3 readers are responsible for reading and scoring each essay. These three scores must all agree to within one point. (And if the scores do disagree by more than one point, then three experienced readers will be brought in to read and score the essay.) For example, one can have 5, 5, and 6 as scores for an essay, but not 5, 4, and 6. Then, these three scores are averaged, and the average score is rounded to the nearest 0.5. Then, this new number is doubled to produce the total essay score. Therefore, scores of 5, 5, and 6 would average to 5.33, and this would be rounded to 5.5, and the final essay score would be 11. Having 3 readers as opposed to 2 would clearly lend more precision to the process. To ensure even more precision, at least one of these readers must be an experienced reader (a “head” reader). Under this new system, we can virtually eliminate the possibility of, say, a 12 essay being scored a 9 or an 8 or vice versa. What do you guys think of my proposal??</p>
<p>I’ve taken the SAT twice. I received a 12 on my first essay and a 12 on the second essay. I’ve taken the ACT three times. I don’t remember what I got the first time, got a 9 the second time, and an 11 the third time. Take from that what you will.</p>
<p>I hear they pay people about $10/hour to score them…but of course, they’re not just random people. There’s one guy I know of who works for an insurance company but has an English BA that scores essays.</p>
<p>I guess you can only hope that person is in a good mood!</p>
<p>And -1 point couldn’t possibly mean -30 points overall. A guy I know got a 790 with an 8 on his essay; so in his case, -4 points = -10 points</p>
<p>My impression of the SAT Writing essay is that it is extremely flawed for all of the reasons mentioned above. I have heard that graders get 3 minutes per essay, at most. Having excellent examples and analysis is worth little; having a sophisticated tone is worth a lot. And we all know about the importance of length. :)</p>
<p>on the march SAT i received a 4 and 6 originally and ended up with a 9 due to the discrepancy :/</p>
<p>The essay graders are taken to an undisclosed location for a few weeks where they do nothing but grade the essays from morning to night. They aren’t allowed to speak or communicate with anyone else.</p>
<p>The SAT essay is even more pointless than the ACT essay. on the ACT, they mostly look for a logical and well put together argument (which is very important for college). The SAT, they look for stupid stuff that does not have anything to do with going to college. Especially in a 25 minute essay.</p>
<p>ugh, so I guess no 12 for me if I didnt fill up the full two pages…</p>
<p>I have a friend who won a national essay contest, but got a 6 on the SAT essay. Kinda dumb.</p>
<p>Wow. That about sums it up.</p>
<p>Odd scores should be proof the the essay grading process is pretty bad. Think about it, shouldn’t all the graders agree on it? The rest of the SAT is based on pure FACT (well…some will disagree). There is ONE right answer among four. For the essay, it’s ENTIRELY opinionated. One person gives it a 3…the next gives it a 4…the next a 5…</p>
<p>forget collegeboard</p>
<p>Haha I got an 11 when I took the SAT in 8th grade (13 years old) in Jan ‘06. I just referenced Columbus’ numerous voyages West in pursuit of finding the Indies, and Marie & Pierre Curie’s experiments to isolate radium. These were things I learned in 7th grade …</p>
<p>But I do have a nice handwriting, and I used up 2 full pages. Maybe my essay was just pleasing to the eye.</p>
<p>Essay graders are NOT taken to an undisclosed location, they grade them from their homes via computer. Jeesh, don’t make it more comlicated/covert, it is done by a rubric the graders must follow.</p>
<p>The SAT Grader Next Door
Retired Fairfax English Teacher Shows Some Essay Scorers Need Not Be Feared</p>
<p>By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 1, 2005; Page B01</p>
<p>Dan Verner, a former English teacher at James W. Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County, was enjoying what he thought was a useful retirement. He helped his daughters with various projects and made sure his parents’ and his mother-in-law’s houses were in good repair.</p>
<p>But his wife, Becky, music director at a Manassas church, did what the wives of seemingly underutilized retirees often do. She suggested he get a job.</p>
<p>Dan Verner, who has taken on five times the average workload for scorers, follows rules that tell him to overlook small grammatical or spelling mistakes in SAT essays. (By Margaret Thomas – The Washington Post)<br>
“I sing in your choir,” he said. That did not satisfy her, so when he saw a newspaper story about the need for experienced educators to grade the new SAT essay question, he thought he might apply.</p>
<p>He learned that the essays were transmitted to official readers via the Internet, so could do the work on the computer in his den. He had always liked sitting and reading by himself.</p>
<p>“No annoying trips out to interact with others!” his older daughter, Amy, observed in an e-mail.</p>
<p>In the nightmares of high school students who must complete the essay in no more than 25 minutes, SAT graders are stiff, cold-blooded monsters who grin wickedly as they take off points for dangling participles, extraneous adverbs and other such flaws.</p>
<p>But in real life, testing officials said, the 3,790 graders are more like Verner, a 57-year-old music lover who said he enjoys judging often unpredictable student essays just as much as he liked teaching for 32 years. He often reads the SAT entries wearing shorts, a T-shirt labeled “Wonderbread” and no shoes while Nacho the family cat slumbers in a chair beside him.</p>
<p>And rather than being devastatingly picky, Verner follows scoring rules that tell him to overlook small grammatical or spelling mishaps and focus on how well an essay delivers its message. “A good piece of writing does certain things,” he said. “It’s organized. It has a central idea and a progression of ideas. The language is effective and vocabulary is apt and varied.”</p>
<p>Verner grew up in Fairfax County, graduated from W.T. Woodson High School (SAT score: 735 verbal, 730 math) and started in his first and only job, at Robinson, after attending Wesleyan University and getting his degree in English at American University.</p>
<p>Having never applied for work since 1971, he thought he was just having an introductory telephone chat with a woman from Pearson Educational Measurement, the Iowa City-based company that won the contract to score the essay question. But when, after 15 minutes of pleasant conversation, he asked when he would get his job interview, she said, “You just had it.”</p>
<p>On May 2, he began his training in Amy’s old bedroom on the second floor of his 1968 brick-and-siding house in Manassas, working on a 1999 Gateway computer cast off by his younger daughter, Alyssa. The Pearson people said the machine needed more memory to receive the scanned, handwritten essays, so Alyssa’s husband, Greg Maimone, a computer expert, came over and snapped in the proper hardware.</p>
<p>Training consisted of 17 hours of reading sample essays, doing 10 at a time and then being assessed on his scoring. He consulted with trainers when he strayed too far from the judgment of the College Board, which administers the SAT, of what should merit a 6 (clear and effective) or a 1 (murky and disorganized).</p>
<p>Verner’s problem was that he had worked at one of the highest-achieving high schools in the country. He said it took him a few hours to recalibrate himself and accept the fact that the national standard for high school writing was below that of Fairfax County.</p>
<p>Early news reports suggested that SAT readers might take less than a minute to judge each essay. But Verner and Pearson officials said the actual time per essay is closer to 2 1/2 minutes. Eventually, Verner said, “I got my mind right. It was like being in a zone.”</p>
<p>The work is organized as if the essays were potato chips in a huge bowl dumped in front of hungry graders. At 1 p.m. on the Tuesday after each Saturday SAT, a 10-day essay scoring period opens during which certified readers can log on to the Pearson Web site at any time except 1 to 8 a.m. and start scoring. Verner’s next chance to score essays will be after the October SAT.</p>
<p>Scorers are paid $17 an hour, with time and a half if they work more than 40 hours a week. Verner said he has never put in more than an 11-hour day during a testing period, with breaks for meals and other relaxation. He estimates that he has read 4,000 essays, usually with the stereo playing classical music – Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C is a favorite – or Gordon Lightfoot for an energy boost.</p>
<p>More than 1.4 million SAT essays have been scored since the test debuted in March, each being read by two graders. Verner has taken on five times the average workload for scorers.</p>
<p>The revamped SAT, which colleges use in the admissions process, has its critics. FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, says on its Web site that the essay question “will encourage educators to focus on how to write formulaic five-paragraph essays rather than developing students’ writing skills more broadly.” Verner said he, too, is a critic of high-stakes tests, particularly the Standards of Learning tests in Virginia, but he said he thinks the SAT writing test is a fair and useful measure.</p>
<p>As a teacher, Verner demanded a lot of writing and rewriting, and he sees the SAT essay as a good short exercise. Teenagers’ writing, he said, is full of pleasant surprises, with humor, personal asides and vivid descriptions.</p>
<p>Verner said a young woman recently told him the myth that scorers give the best grades to those who write the most. “Anyone who has taught writing . . . can recognize the various ruses that students use to make their writing seem more than it is,” he said, “from writing larger to increasing margins to double or triple normal size to using esoteric words.”</p>
<p>Scorers call this “the plethora effect” because many students believe “plethora” is a College Board word and “use it inordinately and often inappropriately in their essays,” Verner said.</p>
<p>Verner said his new job is much more fun than he thought it would be, even when it causes unhappiness in his neighborhood. A student he knows discovered he was a grader and suggested that he put his name in his paper so Verner could be sure to give him a good score.</p>
<p>“It doesn’t work like that,” Verner said.</p>
<p>The boy frowned. “I thought you were my friend,” he</p>