More on Student Writing

I read last week's post about student writing with great interest (although obviously without enough energy to actually comment).

I am one of those professors who assumes that students should be able to write when they get to me (sorry, Velma). I am constantly annoyed by students who do not know how to use punctuation, capitalization, or even paragraph breaks in the appropriate manner. While I am happy to assist them with synthesizing, making connections, and critically analyzing academic literature, I really don't think it's my job to explain that a group of words with no verb does not a sentence make.

I feel vindicated by an article in today's Chronicle about the new SAT writing section and its ability to predict student success.

The authors point out that the SAT may not be a perfect predictor of success, but when teamed with other methods of assessment can prove valuable for college admissions:

Among their findings: When controlling for other factors, such as level of parental education, each 100-point increase on the SAT writing section correlated, on average, with gains of 0.07 on first-year grade-point averages, 0.18 on grade-point averages in freshman English courses, and 0.54 in credit-hours earned.

"While the scores are imperfect," the researchers wrote in a working paper on the study, "taken together with high-school GPA, other portions of standardized tests, AP credit, and noncognitive variables, they clearly help predict first-year student academic achievement.

Certainly, the increases found are small (but significant). I'm left wondering, however, what the writing portion of the SAT actually measures--is it the ability to construct a sentence using the rules of English, or the ability to analyze and critically assess a problem using those skills? I suppose those are questions best left to the researchers in the College of Education.

As a final note, I leave you with the ever-so-wise opinion of Calvin.

*Any spelling or grammatical errors in this essay are the fault of the New Jersey Public School System, and not the author herself.