Mde

bump for March SAT

book_worm

Wuthering Heights and World War II provide enough examples for anything

Phishy

lies/deception/secrecy: Pride and Prejudice, Les Miserables, The Scarlet Letter, Ender's Game, Frankenstein

ChandlerBing

I took the SAT last May, the question was something to the likes of "Is it beneficial to avoid using technology?" and I used the Soviet-American Cold War/Arms Race as one example, and my grandmother, who avoids technology like the plague!
I ended up getting a 12, so really, use any examples that can support your thesis. Using one that is historical/literary and one that is more subjective and personal seems to be the trick to getting a high score.

Old Hickory

Rachel Carson - courage, persistence, launched the Global Environmental Movement

Skylarkin

bumpety, anyone have more examples? that are less generic, like WWs or MLK, perhaps?

Younmi

Alfred Kinsey is a pretty good non-generic example. He was studied sexology, and back then sex had a heavy stigma attached.

juillet

Oh God. I used to score these exams for Kaplan. Of course, these are not college essays, they are SAT essays, and you don't have to worry about being boring. We're not looking to be entertained, and whether or not your essay is entertaining will not affect the score (I promise).

dchow, to answer your question, yes, it is a good idea. It is a very good idea to think about potential questions and examples that you could use in SAT essays ahead of time. You only have 25 minutes to write the thing and you need an edge, and trust me, the prompts are so boring, repetitive and unimaginative that I bet a sufficiently intelligent student from CC could pick one of these at random, shoehorn it into their essay, and still get a 12 if he wrote well enough.

I am ambivalent about the SAT in general but the essay itself sucks seriously. It's formulaic and it doesn't test good writing...it actually penalizes really good writers and teaches terrible writing skills. And BandTenHut is absolutely right that you can make anything up -- your grandfather was the first astronaut on the moon, fake statistics, fake stories from your life -- and use them as examples. And a professor did an analysis of the scores and lengths of SAT essays and found that longer essays invariably got higher scores:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1397024/posts

The CB came out with some bull explanation for this right after the news was released, but it's true.

I always tell my SAT writing students to forget everything that I taught them about SAT essay writing after they get into college.

Oh man, Younmi, how I would love to see a Kinsey example -- I do research on sexuality

harshino

bump -- SAT in a week

AdamAKAMovieman

st. francis of assisi - born into wealth but hated that lifestyle, chose a life of poverty and love, etc.

J. Robert Oppenheimer - genius, father of the atomic bomb, realized the horror of it and founded a commission that tried to stop the arms race

Vietnam - learning from our mistakes, a "failure"

Boo from To Kill a mockingbird - don't judge a book by its cover

Tom Cruise - overrated haha

any more ideas?

Aaron100

Angela's Ashes
Grapes of Wrath
Beloved
To Kill a Mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice

and i hate to say this.. but Obama

1232cricket

historical: MLK and Civil War
Literature: Great Gatsby, invisible man

Axya

@AdamAKAMovieman:
Vietnam - learning from our mistakes, a "failure"

---> So how exactly did we learn from the mistake :-? I'm not sure abt this :-?

letstalkcollege

goblue10nis, how did you use the frontier thesis in your essay?

AdamAKAMovieman

well at the time we thought that we had learned that our huge force isn't immortal, that guerrila warfare is something we've never faced before. you could kind of twist it to say that we repeated our mistakes w/ the Iraq war. like history repeating itself, etc.