When discussing the formation of sociology in Interdisciplinarity, Moran references the work of Auguste Comte who proposed that “all real knowledge was gained through empirical methods and that the procedures of the natural sciences could thus be transferred to the social sciences”.
Could that really be true? Could the mechanical, predictable and empirical methods that worked in math and science really be transferred over to apply to the more liberal and creative social sciences? Immediately, I thought of the SATs, the pinnacle of mechanical, unpersonalized application of empirical methods in the standardized testing age and how the test had attempted to take out the complexity in its essay portion.
I still remember sitting in dimly lit classrooms at my local community college as a retired teacher lectured us on tips and tricks we could use on SAT. There were words that always signaled wrong answers and patterns that could be picked up on and exploited. Like journalist Karin Klein writes in her article, How I Gamed the SAT , “the essay test can be gamed” and the rest of the SAT could be too. It was precisely because of the mechanical and empirical methods used in creating and grading the SAT that made it so susceptible to cheating scandals and tricks.
For most people, the multiple choice portion of the SAT presents less of an issue which is why most colleges and universities still require submitting the Math and Reading sections of the test. It was the Writing portion of the test where mechanical, industrial grading posed the most interesting questions. According to Klein the rules of grading an SAT essay were simple, “Read quickly, read once, don’t stop to analyze, but assign a score from 1 (bottom) to 6 (top) based on my overall impression”. As all English majors know, grading essays (and writing them) is hardly a task simplistic enough to fit inside a 1-6 scale. These essays were graded the same way we would vote for our Homecoming Court: with a quick look over and then a gut-reaction vote.
In Interdisciplinarity, Moran concedes that “the huge complexity and number of variables in social life” make it difficult to employ empirical and mechanical constraints and figures to the disciplines outside math and science. For many Americans, the complexity involved in actually writing good essays and grading them is far beyond the constraints forced on students and later, the graders themselves. The debate continues about standardized tests but until we can agree that at least essays are too complex for a quick read and a quick grade, the sooner we are able to move on from the empirical and mechanical methods of the past.
How I Gamed the SAT, Klein
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-op-sat3apr03-story.html