Milo Beckman, a fourteen year old student at Stuyvesant High School in New York claims to have completed an independent research study that proves that one simple step can improve your score of the S.A.T. in the written portion of the test. It doesn’t even require extra studying – all you have to do to get a good score on the S.A.T. Writing, according to Milo, is write a longer essay.
Milo launched his study after taking the S.A.T. himself the second time and getting a higher score on his essay. This annoyed Milo because he was sure that his second essay was actually not as good as the first. In fact, “I looked up one of the facts I had used in the essay which I wasn’t completely sure of and it turns out I had basically blatantly lied in the essay,” he told ABC News.
So what was so great about the second essay? The only concrete improvement Milo could see was that it was longer. So, Milo decided to see if he could find evidence to support his hypothesis. He asked his fellow students at Stuyvesant to count the number of lines they had filled with their essay and provide him the number, along with their scores. Out of his 115 samples, the longer essays almost always scored higher.
“The probability that such a strong correlation would happen by chance is 10 to the negative 18th. So 00000 …18 zeros and then (an) 18. Which is zero,” he told Good Morning America.
Milo isn’t the only one who has noticed the correlation.
“The more you write, the higher the score. The more words on the page, the higher the score,” Les Perelman, the director of writing across curriculum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told ABC’s Good Morning America. In fact, Perelman says he can predict an essays score 90% of the time simply by its length.
Milo didn’t stop there – in order to compensate for the possibility that smarter, higher scoring kids simply tend to write more he compared scores of students who had taken the test more than once to each other. In each case, the longer essay got the better score.
The College Boards, who create the S.A.T.’s, naturally disagrees with Milo’s findings. Their explanation? “It’s very common for longer writing samples to more effectively convey nuanced, persuasive arguments.” According to the College Boards, the essay section of the test is their best predictor of college success.
