Harvard drops the SAT essay requirement, what does this mean for your students?

Harvard made the news last month when they announced that they would no longer require applicants to submit SAT or ACT essay scores starting August 2019. Until now, Harvard had been one of a handful of schools that required the scores; many schools jettisoned the requirement once the SAT essay became optional in the 2016 redesign of the test.

The History

The SAT’s history with writing has been interesting from the very beginning. From 2005 to 2016, the SAT featured a mandatory essay section at the beginning of every test. These prompts asked students to respond to short quotations followed by questions, such as “Do people have to be highly competitive to succeed?”* The graders expected students to use a variety of examples to support their response: the rule of thumb was that students should use at least one literary, one historical, and one current example to back up their claims. In 25 minutes, it’s impossible to write a good essay that features all of these, but the grading scale didn’t seem to reward good writing or penalize bad writing. As long as students had their examples - which didn’t even have to be true - and used “SAT vocabulary,” they seemed to score well. The essay became increasingly coachable: students memorized their examples and word lists before the test and then shoehorned them into whatever prompt they were given. In 2007, Les Perelman, an MIT professor, coached a college student to write a completely nonsensical SAT essay (which earned a near-perfect score) and then presented the essay at a writing conference, opening the College Board up to ridicule.

While the ACT didn’t undergo a complete remodel in 2016 like the SAT did, it also needed to revamp its writing section. Prior ACT essay prompts dealt almost exclusively with “teen-centric” topics like dress codes, driving ages, school libraries and grades, and expected students to rely on their own experiences for evidence to support their claims. The resulting essays were argumentative, but not exactly scholarly, and the format encouraged the kind of rigid, 5-paragraph model that college composition instructors (like myself, in a former life) try to drum out of their students.

Unlike its SAT counterpart, the ACT essay has always been optional. But, since students couldn’t opt out of the SAT essay, schools had to require the “optional” essay from applicants submitting ACT scores. Otherwise, they couldn’t make an an apples-to-apples comparison of applicants. Once the new SAT debuted, separating the essay from the rest of the test, colleges were free to make their own decision regarding the essay for both the SAT and ACT.

A Deeper Look

Although both types of essays attempt to measure critical reading and writing skills, they do it in two very different ways. The SAT’s essay is a bit more reading-heavy than the ACT’s, but that’s not surprising: the redesigned SAT is a much more reading-intensive test. Each SAT essay prompt gives students an excerpt from a book, essay or speech and asks them to analyze the author’s rhetoric. They’re always persuasive pieces about real-world topics like the overuse of air conditioning and the decline of local libraries. The passages vary in length, but they can be as long as 700 words, which is no small chunk of text. In order to score well, students need to be able to clearly identify the rhetorical techniques that the author uses to persuade his or her readers.

The student isn’t supposed to agree or disagree with the author’s viewpoint; instead, the goal is to understand and explain how the author crafts the argument. If that sounds a lot like the AP English Language exam, well, that’s because it is. The College Board created both tests, and there’s a lot of overlap.

Every SAT essay has two graders, who will give it a score of 1-4 in three different areas. The SAT then adds the two scores together, so your student’s final score will be a 2-8 in three different categories:

• Reading: does the essay demonstrate that the writer understood the passage? It’s important to identify the author’s goals early on in the essay.
• Analysis: does the writer identify several (we recommend three) rhetorical techniques at play in the passage? Common elements of rhetoric found in these passages include diction (word choice), repetition of words or phrases, rhetorical questions, and imagery.
• Writing: is the essay well-written? This is a wide category, encompassing argument logic, paragraph structure, and the nuts-and-bolts of grammar and mechanics.

The ACT essay prompts ask students to read three perspectives on an issue - like public health and intelligent machines - and to craft an argument that takes a position on the issue. The graders expect students to incorporate aspects of all three perspectives into their own essays, but the thesis has to be original. The student can agree or disagree with any of the perspectives, so long as they clearly create a unique argument. If the SAT essay was like an AP Language question, the ACT essay is bit like a DBQ in AP US History, except that the “documents” given to the students are only a few sentences long. There’s less reading involved than in the SAT essay, but the task itself requires more thought and planning, because students have to pull from various sources to create a new, unified argument.

Like its SAT sibling, the ACT essay also comes with two graders. These graders give each essay a score of 1-6 in four different areas. Again, just like in the SAT, the two graders’ scores are added together to give the student their full score. The graders give a score in four categories:

• Ideas and Analysis: does the essay have a clear, original argument that engages with the three perspectives without simply regurgitating them? This is challenging - a student cannot get a high score by simply stating that there are many ways to look at an issue. The ACT graders want to see the student take a stance.
• Development and Support: does the essay feature examples and solid reasoning to support the thesis? These examples do not have to be statistics or facts; students should be able to explain their thinking with hypothetical examples and reasoning.
• Organization: is the essay organized in a logical way? A strong essay has clear, structured paragraphs and uses topic and concluding statements.
• Language Use and Conventions: is the essay’s language clear and correct? The graders won’t quibble over a few misplaced commas, but students should pay attention to major grammatical areas like subjects and verbs.

The Debate

Both tests force students to engage with real-world problems, often far from their own perspective. Few students have personal experience with the Elgin marbles, and even fewer of them have a opinion about whether or not they should be returned to Greece. In both tests, all of the information that they need is in the prompts themselves, but they have to read critically and carefully before they begin writing. While students can improve their essay score by honing their writing skills - brainstorming, drafting and editing - they can’t come into the exam with pre-formed examples or ideas.

You may be thinking, “Wow. That all seems great! Why wouldn’t colleges want to test our students on critical thinking and clear writing?” When you put it like that, it seems strange that competitive schools like Harvard and Penn wouldn’t want to see the essay scores. But there are very good reasons that schools make that decision.

The first reason is academic: admissions and educational experts question the value of standardized writing in admissions. When Penn decided to drop its SAT and ACT essay requirements in 2015, Eric Furda, Dean of Admissions, said that “the essay component of the SAT was the least-predictive element of the overall writing section of the SAT” according to their research. That research related to the older SAT essay, but Penn did not revive the requirement when the College Board rolled the new test out. In fact, right before launching the new test, the College Board admitted that the essay is not a surefire indicator of success: “While the writing work that students do in the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing area of the exam is strongly predictive of college and career readiness and success, one single essay historically has not contributed significantly to the overall predictive power of the exam.” The ACT has been a lot quieter about their writing test, saying only that “the ACT writing test complements the English and reading tests,” but that students should only take the essay if the schools they wish to apply to recommend it.

There’s an economic component to these college decisions as well. Taking the SAT with writing adds $14 to your registration fee, while the ACT essay adds $16.50, which means that the full registration for either test hits the $60 mark. More importantly, states and schools that subsidize registration fees for low-income students do not always offer the essay in their fee waivers. As colleges seek high-achieving students from all ends of the economic spectrum, the essay could be a barrier for some students. In her statement, Harvard spokesperson Rachel Dean cited this economic aspect as the reason Harvard made its change. Schools like Dartmouth say that they will accept essay-less applications from students with a financial hardship, but that brings the value of the essay into question.

It isn’t as if Harvard doesn’t care about writing: applicants must complete a Writing Supplement to the Common Application when they apply. Most top-level schools have their own application writing requirements, which allow them to set the goalposts for student writing in a way that aligns with the school’s priorities. In that sense, the SAT and ACT essays seem unnecessary.

Should My Student Take the Essay?

As a tutor, that’s one of the questions I hear most frequently from parents, and there isn’t a simple answer. It’s tempting to think, “Well, if Harvard doesn’t want the essay, then it must not be useful.” The problem is that a student who is applying to Harvard is also probably applying to other Harvard-level schools. The Ivy League is split roughly in half when it comes to the essay: Harvard, Penn, Columbia and Cornell don’t require the essay, but Yale, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth do. Outside the Ivies, a fair number of top-level schools do require the essay, including Duke and Stanford. If your student is trying to build an essay-free college list, they will be missing out on some really fantastic schools. Yes, the essay can be an uncomfortable stretch at the end of a very long test day, but the opportunity to go to Duke is certainly worth it.

I always recommend my students get at least one good essay score under their belt during their testing season. The essay can’t be taken on its own; if you find out that you need the essay score late in the application game, you have to sit for the entire SAT or ACT all over again, even if you have the scores you need. However, you don’t have to take it every time. Many schools will combine a writing score from one sitting with section scores from another.

We don’t know if other schools will follow Harvard’s lead in dropping the essay requirement. Given the school’s prestigious reputation, it’s certainly possible. For now, however, let’s keep those pencils sharpened.