The Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT, is a test written by budding students to gauge their ability in three main fields. The fields cover math, reading and writing and have a number of questions designed to evaluate the students ability to cope with further learning.
For examiners, the math and reading sections are fairly straight forward, both from a setting and marking point to view, but the writing section is not quite that simple. The students are required to write an essay on a given topic, but the complication comes in that the essay has to be physically read by the marker to be scored. This can be very time consuming.
But, in 2005 the director of the MIT writing program, Les Perelman, figured out that one could accurately score the essays solely by counting the number of words. Perelman analysed a number of tests and discovered that he could grade the essays to an accuracy of over 90% using this method.
While this might sound bizarre, it's not all that far fetched. The theory behind the count based score is that, students have a limited amount of time in which to write the essay and those that have a good grasp of writing skills will be able to write more in the allotted time.
Thus, the longer the essay, the better (in theory) the student is at writing.
