Blogger SAT Challenge update
Remember that Blogger SAT Challenge thing I mentioned a while back? Well, the scores are in, and the results have been published on a blog created just for the Challenge, which you can visit here.
Even if you didn’t write an essay for the challenge (and I haven’t heard from anyone who did), you should go check it out. All 109 essays composed for the challenge are posted, and the general blog-reading public is invited to rate them (to compare their scores with those given by us “expert graders”).
The broad-brush, general first impression of the results? Bloggers are no better than high school students at writing timed SAT-style essays. Much discussion is sure to follow on the site, on Chad’s and Dave’s blogs, and elsewhere on the statistical breakdown of the scores, common characteristics of blog-writing and how those mesh with the goals of the SAT, the validity of the test for measuring writing skill and college-readiness, and of course what this means for our students, the fabric of our society, and the universe as a whole.
I have to zip off to school now, but I’ll certainly be commenting on all of this later, probably both here and at ScienceBlogs. The standardized-test dork in me is totally psyched.