Those of us with children in their junior and senior years of high school are quite familiar by now with the wringer that is the college admissions process. At the center of that process is the dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) administered by the College Board, supposedly as a predictor of student performance in a college environment. For decades, it had the same basic format, a math section and a verbal section, each worth 800 points, for a combined “perfect” score of 1600. Two years ago, the College Board added a third section to the test, a “writing” section centered on a series of essays, each graded on a scale of 1-6 (six being perfect), using a set of “objective” criteria developed by the College Board. The “perfect” SAT score is now 2400. However, many schools, including most of the Ivy League schools, do not yet use the scores of the SAT writing section in their student admissions process. Most require their own essays, which are judged and scored by their own reviewers using their own criteria. The reasons cited by most (and I sat through these lectures at several schools) are (a) lack of a track record for the section as a predictor; and (b) disagreements with the evaluation criteria used for scoring the test. Over at the Phi Beta Cons blog at National Review Online, Robert Verbruggen is upset by this:
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