Scoring details – In the SAT if a student answers a question incorrectly a quarter credit (1/4) is deducted from their overall score. No credit is deducted for blank responses or incorrect Grid–In responses. The SAT Verbal, Writing and Math scores range from 200 to 800 (making the SAT total anywhere from 600 to 2400). The average subscore is close to 500 or 1500 overall.
Essay grading is done via the Internet by high school and college English teachers. The College Board trains these graders in what makes for a good essay and monitors their work. Two readers read each essay, assigning 1 to 6 points based on quality. If the two readers are more than two points apart, a third reader weighs in, (which only happens 2 percent of the time).
The College Board provides readers with an explanation of what merits scores of 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1. According to their scoring rubric, “an essay that rates a 6 is an effective and insightful writing task,
well–organized and fully developed with appropriate examples to support ideas, with consistent facility in use of language variety and sentence structure and vocabulary.” The essay tests basic writing skills, not creative writing talent.
College admissions staff have access to an applicant’s SAT essay. This is an important development. If there is a significant disparity between what is submitted by the student in the testing environment and what is submitted on the application, everyone will wonder how the same writer (theoretically) could produce both essays. No spell-check or grammar aid in word processing could make up for such a disparity. The student must have had help on the application essay; therefore the SAT essay may be a better indicator of his/her writing ability. That said we should not completely dismiss the time variable. The SAT I essay is timed; therefore, an applicant might be able to put together a better essay later in college with more time to complete the writing task. This would imply that the SAT essay underpredicts writing ability.
Other Issues - Colleges use standardized tests in a variety of ways, and it varies from school to school. Some colleges, including a few small elite private schools, do not require them for admission, but the vast majority of four–year colleges do. Some admissions officials said they like the idea of seeing the timed writing sample to see how it tracks with the essay submitted as part of the college application process. Robin Mamlet, dean of admission and financial aid at Stanford University, said she would be less interested in the score assigned to the essay and more interested in seeing the essay itself. It would provide another tool for evaluating a student. Here’s a list, albeit incomplete one that is and growing daily, of schools that do not require SAT scores: Mount Holyoke, Lewis and Clark, Pitzer, Hamilton, Holy Cross, Bard, Gettysburg, Bowdoin, Dickinson, Drew, Franklin and Marshall, Union, Middlebury, Muhlenberg, Hampshire, Connecticut College, Hobart and William Smith, Lawrence University, Providence College Saint John’s in MD and NM, McDaniel.
The SAT tests problem solving ability. It does not test for mastery of specific content nor does it measure intelligence. It simply attempts to determine if a student is able to process new information quickly and make some decisions. As you probably know, there are special accommodations for students with learning differences to take the SAT. This is a fairly controversial topic. You can obtain from the College Board special testing accommodations, e.g., extra time per section, alternate test delivery methods, etc.
