“They get some media coverage, it’s not that interesting. “Somebody takes a whack at the SAT, so what?” Coleman said when I met him in his office at the College Board headquarters near Lincoln Center last month. Right around the time Coleman was appointed as the board’s next president, he read an article about Perelman’s research in The New York Times and decided to reach out to him. Fifteen of his pupils scored higher than the 90th percentile on the essay when they retook the exam, he said. He encouraged them to sprinkle in little-used but fancy words like “plethora” or “myriad” and to use two or three preselected quotes from prominent figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, regardless of whether they were relevant to the question asked. “You can tell them the War of 1812 began in 1945,” he said.

He told them that details mattered but factual accuracy didn’t. More recently, Perelman coached 16 students who were retaking the test after having received mediocre scores on the essay section. His earliest findings showed that length, more than any other factor, correlated with a high score on the essay. Since 2005, when the College Board added an essay to the SAT (raising the total possible score from 1,600 to 2,400), Perelman had been conducting research that highlighted what he believed were the inherent absurdities in how the essay questions were formulated and scored. Of the many things the College Board does - take part in research, develop education policy, create curriculums - it is perhaps most recognized as the organization that administers the SAT, and Perelman was one of the exam’s harshest and most relentless critics. In July 2012, a few months before he was to officially take over as president of the College Board, David Coleman invited Les Perelman, then a director of writing at M.I.T., to come meet with him in Lower Manhattan.

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