the SAT essay

The new SAT has an essay, and since the creators of the SAT have to grade so damn many essays and to do so consistently, they've had to create a somewhat simplistic scoring rubric. One of their more questionable rules is that the graders do not count off for factual errors.

In a way, this makes sense -- if I quoted Keats but said the quote was from Rimbaud, it doesn't seem fair or consistent that some graders would spot the error and count off, but some wouldn't know any better; the graders must grade by standards accessible to all graders.

The upshot of this is that someone in my company wrote a quite articulate SAT essay about the time Lincoln freed the Jews -- and she got a perfect score.