518 College English College English, Volume 72, Number 5, May 2010 T EXTS OF O UR I NSTITUTIONAL L IVES : SATs for Writing Placement: A Critique and Counterproposal T Emily Isaacs and Sean A. Molloy Emily Isaacs is associate professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is co-editor with Phoebe Jackson of Going Public: Student Writing as Public Text. Her work on the teaching of writing and writing program administration has also appeared in Writ- ing Center Journal, Pedagogy, and several edited collections. She is currently working on a monograph on writing at comprehensive state universities and, with Melinda Knight, on a series of articles document- ing the state of writing studies through examination of 101 college and university writing programs. Sean A. Molloy , after twenty-five years as a practicing litigator and five years as an adjunct professor at Montclair State University, is currently a lecturer at Bergen Community College in New Jersey, where he teaches basic writing. He is completing his master’s degree in English with an emphasis in writing studies through a study of the effectiveness of the basic writing program at Montclair State University. he SAT writing section (SAT-W) is a baby, now only five years old. Effec- tive for fall 2007, General State University (GSU) began to use SAT critical reading (SAT-CR) and writing section scores as the sole placement measure for writing courses. In effect, GSU adopted an SAT-W score of 410 as its cut score for placement into its mainstream first-year writing course, College Writing I (College Writing). 1 Incoming students with an SAT-W score of 400 or lower were placed into the developmental Introduction to Writing course (Intro Writing). Use of the SATs for placement is extremely attractive to colleges and universities for obvious reasons of economics and expediency, and thus, despite widespread distrust of SATs by writing program administrators and writing faculty nationwide, the SATs are increasingly becoming our national placement instrument. However, a year after instructor-led analysis of the placement and performance of all first-year writing students placed in Intro Writing and College Writing through the SAT-W section, and as predicted by the writing faculty at GSU, we have confirmed that the new SAT placement system has poorly served and even harmed many GSU students. We suspect that writing faculties across the country may feel as overwhelmed, frustrated, horrified, and outraged as the GSU writing program administrator (WPA) did when she first tried to resist the implementation of this deeply flawed placement Copyright © 2010 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.