Application essays and college writing

Princedog
Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:20:17 +0000

One of my problems with the SAT essay is the scoring. I would hope the admissions officer would read it and judge for themselves if they are going to assign it a lot of importance. To get an 11, I got a 6 from one reader, and a 5 from the other. What if I’d gotten two readers who gave it 5? I’d have a 10. Two who gave it 6s and I’d have a 12. I think 10 and 12 are kind a fair difference.

Also I got a 9 the first time and IMO it was the better essay. But it was more complicated rather than simplistic unrelated examples (which is what I did on my second one after seeing from others what scored well). This scored better. It didn’t really reflect much organized depth of thought. It was examples from my life about cooperation and competition. I feel like anyone could be coached to write the essay I did that time. I did it without coaching, or even preparation, but there’s no way to know that. It seems like a very formulaic thing that could be drilled into someone. The prompts don’t represent much.

I do think it has some value. In a case of obvious discrepancies where the essay is horrible, then okay. Something will be up. But an essay that’s just below par the polished piece doesn’t mean a lot, especially since some people are at somewhat of a disadvantage. 25 minutes is not a lot of time, if you want any planning time at all. This isn’t all that realistic. Both times I had to just start writing and barely finished as it was. For someone who needs to edit after initially writing (luckily I don’t), there is going to be some discrepancy between a finished product and their SAT essay, even though they may have great revision skills. You know what would be kind of interesting would be to have ten minutes after the initial writing period to switch to another color and mark changes. This could never be regulated and isn’t realistic on the standardized testing front, I’m just saying it would be more practical writing process wise and interesting. Haha, I need “editing” time on my math section…