The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, outscored Earnest Hemingway (& others) on the writing portion of the SAT, as reported by the Atlantic Monthly in 2004. Now, hundreds of universities, including several top schools, ignore students’ scores on the writing section of the SAT in admissions decisions, according to a story in the Boston Globe.

The College Board, which administers the test, said its surveys and checks of university websites show that 56 percent of the roughly 1,000 four-year colleges do not use the writing section for admissions, although the overwhelming majority of the nation’s 61 most selective colleges use it in some fashion.

Criticism about the essay has been building for more than a year since an MIT professor’s experiment indicated that students could get high scores simply by writing longer and throwing in big words.

A claimed advantage of the writing test is that students who prepare for it see a general improvement in their writing. Not so, says Les Perelman, director of MIT’s writing program.

“They’ve learned to write paragraph essays where they don’t care whether the facts are correct,” Perelman said. “We have to spend a year in freshman composition deprogramming them.”