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> Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing arou
by yoz-y 7y ago
> Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing around and realized that the more words I added, the higher the score, whether they were relevant or grammatical or not.
Frankly, this does not change anything from my experience in school decades ago. The teachers always said that the length does not matter and we should not pad the papers. However students who wrote more pages got better scores every single time.
- MertsA 7y agoHistorically on the written portion of the SAT length is substantially correlated to the final score.
- chessturk 7y agoI'm not sure that's an issue by itself. If the prompt is broad enough, a minimum length can be reasonable for essays. It certainly could be a problem if the prompt was too narrow, or time constraints, or some other factor. Do you think the correlation by itself indicates something negative/inefficient I'm missing?
- yoz-y 7y agoI think that the required length should be bounded on both sizes and penalised if the paper is either too short or too long.
- bradstewart 7y agoIs it possible that the students who wrote shorter papers were in fact presenting incomplete arguments and/or thoughts? Writing clearly and concisely is extremely difficult.
- yoz-y 7y agoIt is possible but all of them? Also by “short” I usually mean four pages which was the usual recommendation for a paper length. To have a good grade one would need to write ten. The subject was usually something vapid so most of that must have been drivel.