<p>It seems as if the graders are going to check essays for style, not substance.</p>
<p>They’re interested in smooth transitions, correct spelling, and if the topic requires a stance on an issue, a “strong” argument and not “on the fence.”</p>
<p>If this is all true, then just how much can I lie / make up stuff?</p>
<p>Supposedly you can lie all you want. But I think you should probably at least not make it obvious you are lying. For instance, if it is a personal example, don’t make the name of your “friend” Joe-Bob Fakename or something. If you are making up statistics from a clinical study, don’t make them too outrageous as to be impossible.</p>
<p>Actually that is alowed. The graders may not mark you down (I am a grader myself). The only thing you cant do is twist well known facts. Example: Saying africa is connected to the United States or that the world exploded in 1995.</p>
<p>yeah its a well-known fact that the world actually expolded in 1996.
=D</p>
<p>Oh Harvard Genius please explain how you do evaluate an essay. You must all have a checklist so theres some consistency across the board right? How much time do you spend on an essay. i got an 800 on my sat 2 writing test a couple of years ago and i didnt think it was THAT good. do you all pretty much grade easy, or is there a typical spread of scores on the essay? and how did you get this gig …are you still at harvard? or are you a genius from Harvard, Mass. … sorry…</p>
<p>I teach @ Princeton Review and I will be going into my 3rd year @ Harvard in the coming weeks. The essays are very easy to grade, basically you just read it over in like 1-2 minutes and assign it a score. There is nothing really special about it. You may have read places that the essay is graded hollistically, and it is true. There are huge differences between each intervals so in my opinion they are quite easy to grade.</p>
<p>i hope this isn’t a bother to answer …but do you then put all YOUR graded essays together and read each one quickly again to see if you were consistent among your pile of essays? do you put them in piles of 500’s 600’s 700’s etc? Doesn’t it matter somewhat that the graders apply similar standards? you could get a tough grader or an easy grader! do you care to share what your lowest score essay was like and the highest? what are you looking for in a top notch essay? thanks so much .</p>
<p>Im afraid im not sure what you mean exactly. The essays are graded on a scale of 1-6. I grade each one individually. We are mandated to grade 200 essays in a period of Approx. 4 hours. I dont reread essays to make sure Ive graded them right because ive graded so many I know the differences.
To answer your request about a top-notch essay ill split it in half first. Essays with grades earning 1-3 have serious difficultys. Obviously a 1 essay is the biggest POS in the world. If it demonstrates even some thinking it is a 2. A 3 goes to a fairly bad essay that has somewhat use of grammar, essay-format, and examples. Now the 4-6 essays are all good. But with each notch you go up the scale something new is brought. A 4 is, generally speaking, a good essay. It has good structure, basic grammar + punctuation mastery. Also the essay is fairly well supported, but not exactly very well developed. A 5 is where the fine-tuning comes in. A 5 shows varied sentence structure and some advanced grammar mechanics as well as increased vocabulary level. In fact, the difference between a high 4 and low-med 5 is the key to those 3 things. By improving those, you almost guarentee yourself a 5. Basically you need to realize who your audience is. Well, the audience will be reading the papers in less than 2 minutes and then giving you a score. If it has good vocab and good sentence structure, that is going to stick out. To get a 6 a couple of things are needed. First is out-of-the-box thinking. We read a ton of essays, so if you want to get a 6, you need to surprise us. A big plus is transitions. We love transitions because the essay flows together smoothly with them and they arent expected of a rough-draft by any means, but having them raises your chance at a top notch grade incredibly. Examples should be well supported and more importantly well though-out. You should ALWAYS mention why this is relevant to your arguement or it is not truly a persuasive paper.</p>
<p>I hope these pointers help!</p>
<p>thanks this is a really good window into how to put together a pithy essay on the spot. my approach to doing essays is to ask my self what are they really asking? try to redefine the question a bit. Just one more quick easy question… if you grade the essays 1 thru 6 how do they get translated into SAT grades… like 600, 610, 620 etc to top score of 800. or are the essay scores just a coarse grading that compares to your 6 levels … 800, 700, 600, 500, 400, 300? i guess my question is does the college board essentially rescore the essays into their numbers.</p>
<p>Harvard_Genius, do you grade for the PR or for CB? If it’s for CB, how’d you end up getting that job?</p>
<p>Spiker, they combine your essay score (2-12, two readers each give it 1-6) with your raw grammar score. Then there is a raw score to scaled score(200-800) conversion which is different for each test, depending on the difficulty of the grammar multiple choice questions.</p>
<p>You encourage transitions? My teachers always discourage using words like “next” and “finally”. Thanks for telling me!</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that by transitions, they mean connect the different ideas together some how instead of just completely jumping between two different ideas/examples. It should probably be something more formal than “Another example of” and "In addition, "</p>
<p>It would suffice though.</p>
<p>Simple transitions are definately sufficient for the essay, but when Harvard_Genius wrote “A big plus is transitions. We love transitions because the essay flows together smoothly with them and they arent expected of a rough-draft by any means, but having them raises your chance at a top notch grade incredibly,” I was assuming (maybe incorrectly?) that he meant transitions that “weave” the parts of the paper together</p>
<p>Could you give examples of these transitions that greatly help the essay score?</p>
<p>I grade for PR not CB.
Well theres 2 types: Advanced and Simple.
Simple is like: In addition to, or Furthermore
Advanced is when you connect the two paragraphs through a transition at the end of the first. Say my first paragraph is about dogs and the second is about cats. I could say:
Another animal with similar behaviors of the dog is the cat.
Or I could say
Just like the dogs barking habits, the cat also has many idiosyncratic habit.</p>
<p>Note: The second one presents logic while the first uses a simple grammar convention. The first one is fine for essays earning a score of up to 5 while the second is more for the 6 range.</p>
<p>Im a grader myself at princeton review…Harvard genius, where exactly do u currently reside. Are u near the Boston,mass? or do u work at a different area during the summer?</p>