BLOGGER SMACKDOWN RESULTS….A couple of weeks ago I linked to the “Blogger SAT Challenge,” a brainstorm from Chad Orzel and Dave Munger designed to answer a burning question: can bloggers write as well as the average 17-year-old taking the SAT test? Chad and Dave made up a typical SAT-ish essay question and invited bloggers to answer in a 20-minute timed format.
The main challenge page is here and the essays themseves are here. I was planning to complain that the site does nothing to answer the actual question (how do bloggers stack up to random high school students?), thus forcing me to do all the complex statistical analysis myself, but then I hopped over to Chad’s site and it turns out he’s got results galore. Even a graph! With standard deviations!
You can click the link for the complete blow-by-blow results, but here is Chad’s conclusion: “I don’t think I’d really call these results a significant blow against blogger superiority.” From this you might guess that perhaps the bloggers did not exactly blow away the competition. The official graders (sort of) explain why here.
