Is there a secret to scoring higher on the SAT? According to 14-year-old Milo Beckman, there is: just write longer essays, regardless of content.
A new study contends that if you write a longer SAT essay, you will get a higher SAT score, regardless of the content of your essay.
But that's not the most surprising thing about the study. No, the most unusual thing is that this study was conducted by a 14-year-old high school student who is in the process of taking the test himself.
Milo Beckman, 14, has taken the SAT twice. The second time, he improved his score on the essay. Most students would be thrilled, but Milo was annoyed because he thought his second essay was inferior. [...]
Milo said his second essay did have one thing going for it: it was longer.
"My hypothesis is that longer essays on the SAT essay component score higher," he said.
So he asked his fellow students at New York City's Stuyvesant High School to count how many lines they had written on their essays and to provide their scores. [...]
Milo says out of 115 samples, longer essays almost always garnered higher scores.
Elizabeth Leamy of ABC's Good Morning America has the story: Link