Would You Trust A Multiple-choice Swimming Test

By Author: Kamma
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College writing is a unique combination of creativity, critical thinking, and mastery of conventions of academic writing. In only very small part is Merrell Boots a college writer successful because of the explicit and decontextualized knowledge he or she has about the facts of writing, in other words, that which can be demonstrated in a multiple-choice assessment. Despite widespread use of indirect measurements of writing, since at least the 1970s writing teachers and composition researchers have come to consensus on the belief that we simply cannot measure writing ability with multiple-choice questions in any useful or meaningful way.

White has characterized the efforts of the college composition community since the 1970s to combat multiple-choice writing tests as a "missionary activity" ("Holistic Scoring"). In 2002, in his close study of the effects of No Child Left Behind legislation on writing instruction in American secondary schools, George Hillocks lamented the survival of multiple-choice tests: they "cannot test the higher level strategies, such as bringing ...
... together a variety of disparate information and making sense of it, or compiling evidence in support of a proposition and demonstrating that the evidence actually supports the proposition". Yet multiple-choice writing tests endure, though long discredited as invalid measuring tools, partially because they are arguably more consistent than direct assessments, likely because they enjoy substantial advantages of cost and convenience, and surely because they have been promoted by skilled political rhetoricians, principally those who work for the College Board.

Does the addition of the SAT-W to the two tests students have taken for Merrell Sandal many years the SAT verbal and SAT quantitative provide those of us who care about writing instruction, to say nothing of placement, any reason for celebration, as the College Board seems to think it will We cannot say. It adds actual writing, which makes it appear better as an indicator of writing ability. But the new writing section scores also rely heavily on multiple-choice questions, despite the much talked-about essay. In the end, this test may not be very different from the SAT verbal test. What we can say, based on the College Board's own research data, as well as the data we have gathered about GSU students, is that the SAT-W section is a weak predictor of first-year writing class success.

But what about the SAT-W essay assessment alone It is a holistically graded example of actual student writing. However, in line with most colleges and universities, GSU wants students who can make a reasonably clear and logical point that is supported with some evidence. The SAT-W essay doesn't actually help GSU determine which students can do this because, although clarity is easily valued and assessed by SAT readers, by necessity logic and evidence are given extremely short shrift. Students are not expected to provide credible evidence or more than superficial logic, as is revealed and discussed extensively by Hillocks in The Testing Trap. In his close study of five state assessments and their effects on secondary school pedagogy, Hillocks documents the low value that both logic and evidence hold in the scoring practices of one-shot, on-the-spot, prompt-initiated essay questions.

Moreover, based on our experience as college writing teachers, we believe the College Board reveals itself to deeply misunderstand college writing and pedagogy when it claims that this test replicates a college-level "effective first draft" of anything. No first-year writing student at GSU will ever be asked to write a finished draft of any essay in twenty-five minutes; our curriculum reflects the belief that good writing always requires serious thought and substantial revision.9 Indeed, a critical component of the writing program at GSU is to teach that all good writing is rewriting. For our students, the essay question on the SAT-W would be more fairly compared to a directed free write, a common pre-writing exercise.