The idea of the SAT challenge came from this NYTimes article on SAT essays.

You know, they’re not horrible. But they’re not that great either. Essay #2 is weird in discussing what happens in The Great Gatsby. Essay #3 has spelling errors.

I’ve been grading essays for college freshmen the last three weeks. I’ve graded 210 essays. I would say that at least ten percent of them were better than these. Of course, the essays I was grading were written at home and could be revised. (That’s such a common thing among college freshmen, you know? They love to revise.)