So if you want to design a good timed, pop-quiz essay question, one that can assess writing skills [rather than content knowledge or level of interest in an abstract concept], ask students to write about something relevant to their lives. Try to find a topic that all students can easily relate to their personal experiences, something they've read or studied, or something in their collective cultural experience.

Here's another question from the recent SAT. This one gets closer to the mark:

Take a stand on whether majority rule is a good way for groups to make decisions.

Not bad. All students have some sort of group experience to draw from: school, family, work, sports, orchestra/band, clubs, the list goes on. They can quickly use one of those group experiences as an extended example that supports their thesis. So this question can be used to assess writing ability, to the extent that you can assess writing ability with any timed test.

I would argue however, that with a 25-minute pop-quiz essay, you can't do much more than evaluate someone's ability to write an answer to an unknown topic in 25 minutes. That's not the same thing as being able to evaluate overall writing ability or predict success in college courses. Then again, I'm a stickler for designing assessments that match their own goals. I also prefer that people interpret assessment results according to the skills the assessments are actually measuring, instead of what the reviewers wish they were measuring.

In the end, essay tests should help students succeed, not push and baffle them into failure. So if we're going to give essay tests, we need to give students:

• More than one question to choose from


• More than 25 minutes to write the essay [like two 40-minute sessions over two days, one for a first draft and one for a revision, with a night in-between for reflection]


• Questions that are relevant to the vast majority of h.s. students, but not so broad that they're based on abstract ideas like "creativity" that some graduate-student-test-writer came up with while navel gazing


• Questions that don't have hidden subject matter requirements [i.e., "Using an example from American literature...."]

Reasonable people know that a 25-minute test should never be used in the college admissions process in the first place. College placement, yes — might this kid need a basic writing course, or can s/he go right into freshman composition? — but not as a graded test that can affect college admissions. But since the writing test is here, the College Board should at least design a good, fair test.