Blogger SAT Challenge; Officially Dopey Nobel Web Game

[kate_nepveu]

The results of the Blogger SAT Challenge have been posted; Chad's got a graph if you just want to see the scores, or you can browse — and rate! — all the entries.

(Or you can just make fun of my entry.)

In other news, something I meant to link to a while ago and spaced out on: the official Nobel Prize web site has an incredibly dopey Flash Laser Challenge game, in which you pick up supplies for an Amazing Laser Party in honor of Dr. Photon's invention of the super-laser. Chad was telling me about it while we were walking the dog after dinner, and I had to beg him to stop telling me about it, because I was laughing so hard that I was getting stitches in both sides.

Mind, some of the effect is lost if you don't have Chad doing the voices for the little characters, but it's still very silly. It's also quite easy, so check it out if you want to waste a few minutes.

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I didn't do one, but I'm surprised at how equivocal the entries I've read are. Man, if a question asks you to take a position, you TAKE A MOTHERFUCKING POSITION. Especially if you can make up facts! Making up facts means you win every argument.

Booker T. Washington is more full of a shit than a decades-old outhouse. His claptrap about obstacles being more important than results is the sort of harmful twaddle that has caused American power to decline into irrelevancy here at the dawn of the 21st century. Perhaps Plato said it best when he said, "Jesus H. Christ, can you believe that Booker T. Washington chump?"

[kate_nepveu]

Knowing that people other than graders would read it made me a lot more careful to express myself than I might otherwise have been. I think I did take a clear position, but not a binary one; regardless, I was particularly trying to accurately express what I felt about the question.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I didn't grade the SATs, but after I graduated undergrad I worked for a while at the Psychological Corporation (Bab5 geeks: it was, indeed, shortened to 'PsyCorp') grading the essay portions of standardized tests. I graded Oklahoma sixth graders, and Los Angeles highschool exams.

Part of the reason I think the highschoolers do well is that at least a good portion of them are coached by teachers or by hired coaches on how to do the SAT. They've been pummeled with the "pick a topic statement, write three paragraphs supporting it, state your conclusion" method of writing right before they go in to do it.

For the record, the OK sixth graders were better than the LA HS students, but
(a) the OK 6th graders had been taught that year specifically for the test,
(b) the LA test was one you had to pass to graduate HS so there was a significantly higher percentage of LA students who'd failed it retaking it plus a significantly higher percentage of ESL students
(c) the OK prompt was boring and the LS prompt was more creative, which is great for creative writers but awful for those to whom writing doesn't come naturally.

In the OK test, they had to pick a side for or against wearing headphones while riding a bike and support that statement. The most creative ones were the ones like the guy who said that there were too many stupid poeple in the world, so he was all for wearing headphones when riding bikes. The LA one gave them a list of jobs at a mall and asked them to pick one and write an essay explaining why they were qualified for that job. Which led to some wonderful entries, both in the highly-creative and interesting way and in the badly-phrased and funnily-phrased way that had us howling out loud because they were so accidentally funny.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

* My senior year I was in the Academic Decathlon, where essay-writing is one of the tests. I got trained in how to write a 500-word essay on jsut about any topic in 50 minutes using quotations and examples from our reading, and it's where I learned to use a cluster outline to organize my thoughts.

The very first time we did this, it turns out I'd misunderstood the teacher when she stated the time limit because I thought we had 15 minutes, not 50, so I wrote an entire 500-word essay doing all the above in 15 minutes, then sat around for 35 minutes stealing covert glances at my classmates wondering why everybody was still writing and trying to figure out where I'd gone wrong. XD

[kate_nepveu]

Dude. You speed-writer, you.

Legal writing is highly structured, but I was in rambling-essay mode rather than legal-writing mode. My thoughts about the prompt didn't really lend themselves to legal-writing mode, (maybe) alas.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hand-written, too! We had no computer for every student in those days!

I have been faced with the highly structured aspect because I've jsut read that article about doujinshi that I pointed out to you. XD More footnotes than text, broken up into sections like a technical manual, and it gave a summary, and a highlight, and then an introduction, repeated the stuff asserted in the intro in the body, and then repeated it all again in the conclusion.

[kate_nepveu]

Legal writing runs on the principle "what I tell you three times is true." Legal writers tell the audience what they're going to say, say it, and then tell the audience what they just said.

Whatever the merits of such a system, one does not like to upset reader expectations when the reader is a judge who is going to rule on important matters based on one's writing.