Polysyllabic

The essay on the revised SAT marks a dramatic departure from the old essay. The old essay was a 25-minute, holistically scored exercise in persuasive writing. The new essay is a 50-minute, analytically scored rhetorical analysis.

The College Board just released a statement claiming that SAT preparation works, at least if you use their officially sanctioned provider Khan Academy.

In which I start to analyze the mock SATs from three books.

This is the third of a multipart series exploring the proposition that a large percentage of commercial test-preparation material is of scandalously poor quality. If you want to start at the beginning, part one is here.

This is part two of a multipart series on the quality of commercial test-preparation material.

In part one, I made the rather unoriginal claim that most commercial test-prep material sucks, and suggested that one major reason it's so bad is that doing good work is hard and that there is insufficient financial incentive for publishers to put resources into doing it right.

Yesterday, I picked up a recent edition of the Kaplan SAT Subject Test Literature guide (the 2015-2016 edition, which I gather is actually identical to the more recent edition) and went through the diagnostic test in it. Unfortunately, this mock test had so many flaws and outright errors, was so unrepresentative of the actual Literature Test, that it's hard to see how it could diagnose much of anything. Just how terrible was it? Here's just one example:

The question of whether—or to what extent—the SAT is "coachable" is a perennial controversy. When the recent overhaul to the SAT was announced, College Board CEO David Coleman made a big deal about how the changes would orient the test so that it more closely measured the skills needed for college success. One intended consequence of those changes was that the test would be less susceptible to coaching. Eliminating sentence-completion questions, for example, was meant to discourage students from memorizing long lists of "SAT" words that they would never need again.

In a Time article on the Donald Trump's supposed skittishness over the debate format, Trump is quoted as saying "I want to debate very badly." To which the anti-Trump witticism is, "And I'm sure he will."

There's an excellent discussion of the fake Old English in Paul Kingsworth's novel The Wake on The Toast.

Against the recommendation of medievalists I trust, I bought this novel and read about 100 pages before giving up on it. It wasn't that I found the pseudo-Old English incomprehensible. Once upon a time, Old English was my primary field of study, and I got what Kingsworth was trying to do.

For years, the SAT has struggled to contain well-organized cheating operations that are especially (although not exclusively) active in some Asian countries. Now the ACT is catching up.