Romantic Fiction

What Passes Today for Student Academic Writing

By Will Fitzhugh

A senior at Harvard College recently told the story of her first expository writing class in college. As a high school student in California, she had never written anything longer than a five-paragraph essay. When her instructor at Harvard announced the first paper and said it would be "five to eight," she said, "Paragraphs?" and everyone in the class, including the instructor, laughed at her.

But her experience is not that unusual. A study done in 2002 for The Concord Review found that the majority of U.S. high school students no longer write history research papers. In fact, the head of the history department at Boston Latin School, an exam high school which is the oldest public school in the country, told us that teachers there had not assigned the "traditional history term paper" for more than a decade.

What sort of writing are our students doing instead? In the case of many, if not most, it amounts to diary entries, creative writing, and personal essays, including the sorts of expressions of opinion that require no reading and not much thought. The SAT, starting in 2005, will include an essay component that will account for 800 points of the possible 2400 points on the revised exam. This essay test is much the same as the old SAT II writing test, which thousands of students in Boston have managed in the past to "beat" by spending six to eight hours with a tutoring service. There they are taught to write an essay, memorize it, and then reproduce it to the College Board’s "novel" prompt. According to a report last year in The Boston Globe , students tutored at one such service averaged a score of 747 .