I took my SAT in the days before courses.

keep in mind the introduction of the essay into the SAT exam was a relatively recent change. The biggest problem with education today is parenting. I wasn't supportive of the move towards charter schools initially because I was concerned about the impact they would have on poorer and minority communities. So far though I believe the results have been positive in these communities and the programs are worth protecting and expanding.

Essay grading remains too subjective to me. Grade on content? Grade on style? Does penmanship matter (affect how the reader reacts and grades)?
Multiple choice responses to "passages" can get at comprehension. The essay one writes where required on college applications certainly maintains that option.

Obviously, I have to agree that grading an essay is a more subjective endeavor than grading a multiple-choice answer. Considering the purpose the SAT is supposed to serve, maybe essays do not belong on this test.
What terrifies me, however, is how the art, science and avocation of writing, in general, have fallen by the wayside in our education system. I hire many recent college graduates, often from good schools who graduated with honors. They cannot write. The grammar is terrible. They meander on and on. They express the same idea three different ways weakly, rather than once with clarity. They seldom organize a letter well. There are no topic sentences. Factual recitations do not unfold chronologically, but rather in the order they occur to the writer. Forget persuasive.
I suspect that kids can’t write anymore because they don’t read much. My tech team recently lobbed a criticism of the blogs on my law firm’s website—“There are too many words.” And not enough pictures.
In law school they tell you (or they did 22 years ago when I went anyway) – that if you can’t something, you don’t really understand it. Success in life requires more than picking the correct multiple-choice oval. It would be nice if most dilemmas were susceptible to one of four discreet answers.
Maybe the essay on the SAT wasn’t all that useful to college admissions panels. But that might be because the folks on those panels themselves didn’t want to have to read “too many words.”

oh sorry - Anonymous was me - Michelle Maratto. I was ms. smarty pants talking about the lost art of writing. Yet apparently I am not clever enough to know how to attach my name to a blog comment.

Interesting though Michelle that while most would agree with you, the same generation complaining about the younger generation's short attention span are the same generation complaining for shorter and shorter blogs.

I never believed an essay belonged on the SAT. Its a standardized test, grading an essay is subjective. It doesn't belong there. I also don't think that writing should be time limited. I can write very well but only when I have the proper time to outline and edit. My younger two children took the SAT when the essay was required and my older two took it when there was an essay but the grade didn't count. Either way, there wasn't sufficient time to write a well organized comprehensive essay.

As someone who provides SAT test prep courses, I would argue that the essay is NOT that subjective and is actually quite easy to grade. I think it's also generally indicative of how adept a student is of composing a coherent argument and cogent sentences. However, it's clearly not perfect, and is too easy to game (though surprisingly few students seem to do it!).

The SAT has been losing ground to the ACT for years, it's only last year that the ACT finally caught up. This is in part because more than a dozen states now make it a standard part of testing, so the ACT is locking up a lot of students while the SAT is more "optional." However, no matter how many changes either organization makes, as long as there is standardized testing, it will be possible to prep for it.