Thursday, March 29, 2007

Gaming the SAT

Years ago, when I was getting ready to take the GRE (big brother to the SAT), I found a book describing how to game that test. It was based on a games theory approach to the test, and offered a collection of maybe a couple dozen rules to follow to boost your score.

I don't know how well it worked, but I got a pretty good store on the test.

Now, we see the same kind of thing happening with the essay portion of the SAT.

When College Board announced that they were adding a writing component to the SATs, critics alleged that there was no way to legitimately grade the writing of that many essays each year and that the test would devolve down into writing formulaic essays. Well, now an MIT professor has written a paper outlining what students need to do to game the test and present the illusion of good writing.

And of course, he has come up with a formula.

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