<p>Here’s the article:</p>
<p>From the NYTimes:
SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors
By MICHAEL WINERIP </p>
<p>Published: May 4, 2005</p>
<p>IN March, Les Perelman attended a national college writing conference and sat in on a panel on the new SAT writing test. Dr. Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology…</p>
<p>“It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score,” Dr. Perelman said…</p>
<p>“Because M.I.T. is a place where everything is backed by data, I went to my hotel room, counted the words in those essays and put them in an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop.”…</p>
<p>He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. “I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one,” he said. “If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time.” The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.</p>
<p>He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays…</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html?[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html?</a>
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