Writing: Important to Thompson but Unimportant to College Board? - Group C

Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think” is a great change of pace from McChesney’s depressing, unoptimistic “Digital Disconnect”; I find it so entertaining how both authors can write about the same general subject, yet can have arguments so different from one another. I really enjoy the degree of optimism that is present throughout this text because it makes me realize that not all technology is bad for us individually, as a society, and as a nation (as McChesney basically hints at)!

The one part of Thompson’s book that grabbed my attention was the idea of how writing wasn’t a commonplace for people until the late 1990s. He writes that “before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction” (Thompson, pg. 48). This absolutely blows my mind because I feel like almost every aspect of life is connected to writing in some way, shape, or form. For example, the art of writing ranges from a student conducting a paper for sociology class, to a teenager commenting on his/her profile picture on Facebook, to a journalist writing a sports recap of the basketball game that was played at a local college. No matter where we are, what we are doing, or who we are with, some form of writing will almost always be around us and affect us in one way or another.

It is for this very reason that I am so bothered by the new adjustments to the SATs, and specifically the alterations to the writing portion of the test. This article, posted on Inside Higher ED’s website, goes into detail about the recent changes College Board has made to SAT testing. The change that I cannot wrap my mind around is the fact that the writing test will be optional. Not only is it no longer required, but the current writing test, in which students allude to their own experiences to respond to a topic, will be replaced with one where students respond to a passage of writing and must analyze evidence. Through his book, Clive Thompson talks about all the greatness that has come of writing and how our ability to express our thoughts and ideas, especially on the Internet, has been beneficial. Specifically, the Internet thrives off of the idea of what “social scientists call the ‘audience effect’ – the shifts in our performance when we know people are watching” (Thompson, pg. 54). He writes that “studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more” (Thompson, pg. 55). In the sense of an SAT test, the professional scorers would be the “audience” to which students were writing; with the idea of the “audience effect” in mind, then why would we not require all students to complete the writing section of the test if it will ultimately help them learn more and grow as a student? Since writing is relevant in almost any career, I just do not understand the logic of why College Board would disregard this section of the test.

Moreover, a popular critique of writing today is that technology has “dumbed us down” and that people, especially the younger generation, use informal, Instant-Messaging- like language in almost all formal contexts like emails and academic papers. Thompson proves this accusation wrong and claims that “all those benighted texting short forms, like LOL, that have supposedly metastasized in young people’s formal writing [are] mostly nonexistent” (Thompson, pg. 66).  Even more, Thompson includes a section where Stanford University English professor Andrea Lunsford describes her study which evaluates the growth, or lack of growth, of young people’s writing over the years. Ultimately she has found that the “error rate has barely risen at all” and today’s freshman essays are more than six times longer than before and generally more complex (Thompson, pg. 66).

It is clear that Clive Thompson is enthusiastic about technology and the positive impact it has had on our lives, and especially on the art of writing. However, the College Board executives still made the decision to completely change the makeup of the SATs. What are your thoughts on such a drastic change? Do you think it is beneficial for having the SATs to give students the option to not even do the written part of the test?