"The SAT II is supposed to test achivement in subject areas, including writing. The SAT I is supposed to test reasoning ability and aptitude and a subjective component would defeat the point. The College Board has been slowly retreating on this for years. As you know, SAT stood for "Scholastic Aptitude Test" for the first 55 years of its existence. Then in the late 1990s, charges of racism and unfairness made them change it to "Scholastic Achievement Test." Under the same pressure, they have completely abandoned any name for it at all, and if you look for an explanation of the acronym SAT, you won't find it now because SAT no longer stands for anything."
I understand your point there. However, as subjective as writing is, it is still an essential part of schooling. It is the basic or foundation of most subjects or of importance to most subjects.
Yes, I am aware of SAT II. But as far as I know and recall, SAT II was not required. Hence the presence of writing in SAT II is irrelevant, unless SAT II will be made mandatory. If it isn't made mandatory, then having writing in SAT is very much appropriate. The reality is, students will still have to deal with subjectivity when their speech, English, history, sociology, phil. etc. professors read their materials and give them scores. Many times, people score high in SAT but cannot seem to articulate themselves. I witness many students in the department of maths/CS/engineering who could not articulate themselves. It made communication hard for me and for others. And the worst was professors who could not articulate themselves, not in writing either.
I think much of the problem is that the aptitude testing makes it a system of logic that could be mastered. All it takes is special lessons with Kaplan, for instance, to master techniques. This makes it easy to pass the test without actual knowlege or understanding. I think therefore that testing people's writing would be an excellent means of gauging people's verbal and writing skills.
I do, however, disgree with the decision to remove the analogy section. Sometimes the analogy could be misleading and could be biased from the point of view of one's experience or lack thereof, but it's still good/reasonable for testing in my opinion.
If all of these basic courses were taken care of at high school (sad to know our taxes are often wasted to teach students nothing), then hardly would we be required to spend one or two years taking GE courses. Yes, you can challenge them, but it would be better if we didn't have to be subjected to such.
