[Skip header and go to main content.]
A trio of Princeton Review honchos worry that the new SAT II essay test favors mediocre prose over artistry, dumping the likes of Shakespeare and ‘Ms. Stein’ in the lower percentiles:
We and our colleagues at The Princeton Review have spent many years training students to take the SAT II, and have carefully analyzed the College Board’s essay-grading criteria. To receive a high score a student should write a long essay of three or more paragraphs, with each paragraph containing topic and concluding sentences and at least one sentence that includes the words “for example.” Whenever possible the student should use polysyllabic words where shorter, clearer words would suffice. The SAT essay will not be a place to take rhetorical chances. Flair will win no points; the highest-scoring essays will be earnest, long-winded, and predictable.
The implication here is that the new SAT will correlate much more closely to actual collegiate performance, which should be some comfort.
Anyway, if you read all the way through to the punchline, you find that the test will favor malcontents-slash-sociopaths like Ted Kaczynski, which should further pacify any moaning about bland conformity in writing and education. The latter sort of thing is generally speaking a complaint voiced by many of my friends and acquaintances, bitter because teacher, dean, and professor muzzled their barbaric yawps and furthermore didn’t teach them a damn thing of any use. In response I could feed you some platitudes involving curiosity, spare time, volition, and — god help me — Hakim Bey, but I really do understand. Me, I often mutter about the difficulties and torments that my boss piles upon my wretched workaday life, but the problem with me and my boss isn’t the way he acts qua* boss, the problem is that he’s a boss.
* Two out of every three sentences spoken by a professor of mine used this word. Eventually, I looked it up.