Imagine you are a 17-year-old high-school junior who plans to attend college. Take out a piece of paper and a pencil (not a pen). Absolutely no computers are allowed. Read the paragraph below and follow the directions beneath:

Although most peoples goal is to be happy at all times, being constantly satisfied and untroubled can actually prevent people from changing for the better. After all, why go to the trouble of changing if one is content with the ways things are? On the other hand, discontent often motivates people to make necessary changes. What revolution was not caused by widespread discontent? Who among us has not vowed to make a change because we are unhappy with some aspect of our lives?Is discontent often the first step to action?

Now: take 25 minutes to plan and write an essay responding to the final question. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your readings, studies, experience, or observations. You must handwrite your answer.

[25 minutes later]

Done?Now, ask yourself if youd want someone else to read what you just wrote. Do you think a college professor might be inclined to throw your illegibly scrawled, ill-conceived collection of thoughts out the office window? You might find such a judgment unfair and wish to explain that the essay you wrote did not represent your true abilities or potential.

The above writing assignment came from the College Boards ScoreWrite: A Guide for Preparing for the New SAT Essay. An impromptu, timed essay was added to the SAT in 2005. The College Board claims the essay will provide colleges with a reliable indicator of student success and signal to high schools that they need to put increased emphasis on writing instruction.

The essay mirrors the kinds of writing asked of students in high schools, the College Board claims, helping writers understand the importance of audience, and helping them marshal support for their views. Theres no reason the test should lead to formulaic writing, he asserts.

But how else could a student prepare for such a daunting task other than to plug ideas into a formula? Hand writing a response in 25 minutes will result in superficial prose and the triumph of an already ubiquitous academic exercise, the five-paragraph essay: an introduction that concludes with a thesis statement , three body paragraphs with supporting examples and a conclusion. The pressure to perform well on the essay adds another teaching to the test curricula in high schools (most states, including Ohio,require a timed essay on their required state graduation exams). Such high-stakes tests take time away from other more active, engaged learning and leave incoming college students even less prepared for college-level writing.

Whats so bad about mastering the five-paragraph essay? College students who arrive with at least a five-paragraph model under their belts may be better prepared than those who arrive without it. But what college writing experts know is that to improve writing, students need time to plan, reflect, and revise, something timed essays dont allow. Further, students must feel connected to the topics they write about; writing for the sole purpose of demonstrating competency rarely produces strong prose.

Most important, learning to write is not like learning to ride a bike. As contexts and audiences change, writers must learn new knowledge, new rhetorical strategies, and new structures. Thats why high schools can never do what colleges yearn for them to do. They can only teach high school students to write for high school, because thats the community in which the writing occurs. Only colleges can teach undergraduates how to master our codes or academic discourses. High school and college writing differ, as does business writing from journalism, and technical prose from creative writing.

Further, someone has to score the SAT essaysan estimated 2 million a year. In the tests first iteration, the College Board commissioned Pearson Education to oversee scoring. Pearson hired high school and college writing teachers, paying them between $17 and $22 an hour. Scorers were trained through an instructional eight-hour CD-ROM. (I once applied to be a scorer, but when I learned Id be expected to score 220 essays in an eight-to-ten hour work day, or two to three minutes per essay, without breaks, and to agree to at least 30 hours of scoring a week, I balked.)

Scorers were encouraged to grade based upon the quality of examples students used to support their claims. The guidelines favor lengthy essays that use SAT vocab words and include elite cultural references. In the ScoreWrite pamphlet, for example, a top-scoring essay was lauded for using Margaret Atwoods novel The Handmaids Tale as an example of discontent motivating a society to make radical changes. A low-scoring essay was faulted for weak critical thinking in its appropriate but limited example of Christopher Columbus. Essays that displayed an impressive vocabulary received higher scores. And though the College Board claims otherwise, longer essays generally received higher scores than shorter ones. That the essay must be handwritten provides another hurdle for some students. Messy handwriting, like an unprofessional type font, negatively influences the readers perception of the writer.

Even if studies didnt already exist demonstrating that timed essays are neither reliable nor valid indicators of ability, its clear that no one can ace this essay cold. Performing well requires that students receive effective aids: well-trained teachers, books, Internet access, or best of all, a test-prep class. Unless these resources are equitably distributed, the essay exacerbates the educational gap in this countryexactly what the SAT initially set out to close.