Photo taken by Jesse Blom.
Despite being given an hour, Donald M. Murray, an experienced writer, could not write more than five sentences about a given prompt in Carol Berkenkotter’s study “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer.” Murray goes as far as saying in his response to this study— “Response of a Laboratory Rat—or, Being Protocoled”—that, if Berkenkotter had him do this one-hour protocol first, he would have stopped participating in the study. Normally, Murray spends a lot of time planning and evaluating his thoughts before actually writing, so the result of the one-hour protocol made him feel “so completely trapped and so inadequate”; it was not enough time for him to write a well-thought-out paper.
Reading this immediately reminded me of my experience with preparing for the SAT’s—at the time—thirty-minute essay section. My brother decided he’d prepare me for it by having me write two essays in thirty minutes each week. Back then, I loved writing; I was spending at least three hours a week writing stories with friends online. So, spending an hour a week to practice writing initially didn’t faze me, but it quickly became grueling after a couple of months. While writing stories, I always put my all into it and wanted to do the same with the timed essay. However, its time constraint prevented that and caused me to feel just like Murray: trapped and inadequate. I wasn’t given the room to thoroughly think of a response to prompts, and I started to hate my writing as a result to the extent I even completely stopped writing stories with my online friends.
Currently, the SAT gives students fifty minutes to write an essay. While this longer timeframe is certainly appreciated, it does not—and can not—showcase whether a high-schooler can successfully write a “well-written, well-thought-out response,” as CollegeBoard, the coordinator of SATs, states it does. Fifty minutes is not enough time for anyone to write thoughtfully; it is an invalid assessment.
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