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Our local free weekly rag, the City Pages recently published an "expose" on how the essay scoring sausage gets made on standardized tests. (A lot of the test scoring apparently happens in the Twin Cities.) It's about as you might expect.
I get a feeling I was supposed to come away with the idea that all standardized testing is bad, but I mostly went away with the feeling that standardized test essays were bad news and we should stick with computer scored #2 pencil bubble tests.
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Yow, I definitely came away with the same impression as you. I've always thought the problem with essay questions was just that there is a strict rubric that the writing must fit and that perhaps the people grading the essays are not that good. Never realized that there could be cheating of this sort on the grading side.
I'm going to have to track down that famous NYTIMES op ed where the guy could predict the score looking at an essay from across the room...
My 12 year old recently took the SAT as part of a talent search for gifted kids. She didn't do any prep, but I did give her 3 bits of advice for the writing section: 1)write neatly, 2)write in cursive and 3)write as much as you can in the time allowed.
The first time I tried the writing achievement exam in 1994, I wrote in my natural style - complex, varied sentences, lots of irony, allusions & random historical analogies - and scored a 420.
I tried again three months later, and dumbed it down. Simple, declarative sentences, no attention paid to word flow or tone, no variation in sentence structure whatsoever. I felt dirty.
But, my score went up to 680. In normal circumstances, I'd have been despondent over not cracking 700, but instead, I was relieved.
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