NEW YORK, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- A 14-year-old New York student says he's confirmed a long-held suspicion about SAT essays, that's its quantity, not quality, that scores well.
Milo Beckman, 14, a student at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, has taken the SAT twice.
The second time, he got a better score on the writing skills essay -- which annoyed Milo, because he thought his second essay was inferior though longer, ABC News reported Friday.
So he asked his fellow students to count how many lines they had written on their essays and to provide their scores.
Out of 115 samples, longer essays almost always garnered higher scores, Milo said.
"The probability that such a strong correlation would happen by chance is 10 to the negative 18th," he said.
There's some academic support for Milo's conclusion.
"The more you write, the higher the score," says Les Perelman, the director of writing across curriculum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"The more words on the page, the higher the score," he said.
Perelman says he can predict an SAT essay's score 90 percent of the time just by looking at the length.
"Milo's findings are exciting to me for the reason that any researcher is excited when somebody else takes their research and applies it in an innovative way and replicates it. Because it confirms my research," Perelman says.
