SAT coaches don't necessarily have the same conscience issues as some teachers. "What we recommend is that you memorize the basic essay formula and a couple of facts about a topic you're interested in, so that you pretty much know what you're going to write before you take the test," says Yale sophomore-to-be Janet Xu, guest editor of the latest edition of the SAT guide "Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to The SAT." "This works because the SAT questions are usually very broad."

Indeed. An SAT coach based in Rochester, N.Y., who works for one of the major test-prep outfits and didn't want to be named, recently took the new test himself to see what he was up against. "I was like, OK, I know all about 'The Scarlet Letter,' I know all about Florence Nightingale, I know all about the tsunami," he says. "The essay question was something like, Does work give life meaning? So, Florence Nightingale, her work was to heal people -- that gives life meaning. The tsunami, the rescue efforts showed the meaning of volunteer work. 'The Scarlet Letter' -- I'm sure there was some work in there somewhere ... OK, the work of retribution gave Hester Prynne's life meaning. If you have examples of anything, you can write any essay," he says. "And you can always use Florence Nightingale, no matter what."

In response to Perelman's concerns, the College Board has issued a statement ("I'd give it about a 3," says Perelman) insisting that there is -- and should be -- a general correlation between length and score. "We do find plenty of essays that are long and haven't developed a point of view at all, and short ones that manage to accomplish an amazing amount, but it's rare. I think that's just the way it is," Coletti says, noting that the trained graders, themselves teachers, can surely be relied upon to make the proper distinctions.

Coletti also asserts that writing on demand does have its place -- that it's a necessary skill for tackling not only the on-deadline workplace memo but also the college exam blue book. According to the colleges the board has surveyed, "When called upon to do this, students often display an alarming lack of skill," she says. "A lot of them simply didn't learn it."

True enough, says Xu. Although she's not enamored of the essay section itself, she sees the new SAT as "simply a recognition of the new direction that standardized testing is taking," she says. "Instead of testing kids on whether 'apple' is to 'fruit' as 'magnanimous' is to 'sycophancy,' it's actually testing them on skills they need in college! Gasp!"

Ask a student what he or she thought of the essay, though, and you're unlikely to hear, "Well, it gave me the opportunity to develop and show my preparedness for college, not to mention the odd workplace memo." According to a recent survey by Kaplan Test Prep, only 13 percent of test takers thought the essay was the hardest section of the test -- but 55 percent of them said their scores would not represent their skills. Over 25 percent said they ran out of time and had to turn in unfinished work.

"It was really overwhelming," says Andrew Elliman, 17, a junior at the Kent Denver School in Denver, Colo., who took the test in March. "The question was something like 'Describe the importance of creativity in today's world.' If someone asked you that, you could think about it for years and not come up with a good answer. But 25 minutes? I'd never written an essay on such a broad topic in such a short time. It came out of nowhere, totally broadsided me, like a car accident."

According to the SAT's most cynical detractors, the College Board is torturing students like Andrew only as a means of self-preservation. The rumor is that the writing component was added only in a desperate effort to keep the University of California, a giant client, from dropping the test as an admissions requirement. "The motivation for the 'new' SAT 'writing' test -- we always put 'new' and 'writing' in quotes -- is that it's a marketing ploy," says Bob Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, suggesting that the College Board basically grafted what used to be the SAT subject test in writing onto the "new" test. "The College Board took what had been an unpopular, optional test and used it to burnish their image and enhance their bottom line," he says. Coletti adamantly denies these claims, stating that some sort of writing section has been in the works for at least a decade but has hit mainly technological speed bumps.

Whatever motives you may ascribe to those who inflict the SAT, one point is salient, says Perelman. "We're one of the few developed countries in the world where such testing is done by private agencies with no supervision by a public or quasi-public organization. It's very much as if we allowed drug companies to market drugs without the FDA. To quote Juvenal in his sixth Satire: Who watches the watchmen?"

"I could have told you that that was from Caesar's 'Gallic Wars,'" he adds. "But it wouldn't have made any difference."

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