<p>good handwriting + good vocabulary + full 2 pages of writing = 12 (at least in my experience)</p>
<p>The SAT essay does not test your ability to write stylistically flawless, beautiful prose. It tests your ability to write the first draft of an academic paper, in which you should display varied vocabulary, structural diversity and examples that will corroborate your lucidly stated thesis. Many incredible writers would probably write 6s and 8s on the SAT essay, because writing prose is so much different than writing an academic paper.</p>
<p>Bottom Line: If you think you are a good writer (or know so), you may have a significant disadvantage on the SAT-writing well is not the issue, writing as they want you is the issue (and by that I mean exactly the format and register in which you would write a historical investigation)</p>
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Which I always found very unfair to people (like me) who have nad handwriting. Because if I slowed down enough to make my handwriting pretty, no way would I write two pages, but otherwise it was hard for them to read.</p>
<p>Blah.</p>
<p>I think that the purpose of the SAT essay needs to be evaluated. Personally, I think that the purpose should be to test that you are able to write high-quality research papers in college. Currently, the SAT essay does almost nothing to predict how these papers will be. As a professor from MIT pointed out, people with glaring factual mistakes in their paper were getting 12s. In my opinion, that is outrageous. </p>
<p>The essay should be put back into a subject test(so you can have 1 hour to complete it), and should consist of reading factual documents and formulating a position on an argument. As it stands now, the SAT essay is merely a reflection of how well a person can talk about their life experiences. This is not the most important writing trait for college students to have. The SAT needs to evaluate how well you can read and make a position on documents. After all, that is what most paper writing is in college, whether it be writing a position on a book one read, or writing a research paper.</p>
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<ul>
<li>The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins</li>
</ul>
<p>I beg to differ. So what if the essays have factual mistakes? That is not the purpose of the essay, nor should it ever become. The essay is the first draft of a college research paper, not in the sense that you got your facts right, but in the sense that:
[ol]
You can formulate a thesis lucidly and proceed on explaining it
[<em>]You can support this thesis with examples from literature, history and others
[</em>]Your vocabulary is varied and of academic level
[li]Your structure is suitable for college papers[/li][/ol]</p>
<p>debate_addict: Isn’t what you’re saying leaving out a huge portion of writing a first draft of a research paper: gathering facts and presenting them? How can you formulate a thesis on a research paper without actually, well, doing research? The SAT essay is the farthest thing from a research paper: it doesn’t require the use of ANY factual information other than what you know off of the top of your head. The SAT essay merely instructs students to take a position on a topic and talk about life experiences that support it, not to read an article or two, formulate a position, and use facts from the article to support it.</p>
<p>A better idea for the SAT might be to select two articles from scholarly journals with opposing viewpoints, present a prompt, and have students quote the articles to support their thesis. This would be much more realistic than the current prompts.</p>
<p>as I said before, it’s not about what you write, it’s about how you write it!!!</p>
<p>Mike, you have to KNOW the research before hand. I somewhat agree with debate_addict. Why do you think everyone usually says, “Stay away from personal experiences,”? It’s because they’re right. Personal experiences are NOT hard fact. However, if someone read the Tale of Two Cities, then s/he can write about it, but if someone didn’t read that book, then they might have to use something generic, which is much less “impressive” to a grader. The essay grading process is flawed, end of story. BTW, that 57 year old musician or w/e…I could care less about him.</p>
<p>If I were a grader, I’d give everybody 5s and 6s.</p>