Is this a 12 essay?

cheerioswithmilk
Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:22:14 +0000

Hello CC’ers. First, a backstory. When I took the SAT in October, I scored a 9 on the essay; I knew I hadn’t done well because I had ran out of time and my examples were subpar to say the least. Fast forward two months, and the December SAT is in about a week. I’ve been working on improving my essay to a 12 by doing lots of practice essays and reading “How to score a 12 in 10 days”. If someone could kindly judge my essay and see how I’m doing, it would be greatly appreciated.

The prompt for the essay was “Is the way something seems to be not always the same as it actually is?”

Here we go:

Often times, things are not what they seem to be. Our sense commonly trick us into thinking that what we see is reality, even though it may not actually be what is there. Examples from history, literature, and science all support this idea that what something seems is not what it actually is.
One good example of how things aren’t always what they seem to be comes from World War I. Because of international maritime law, merchant ships, were not allowed to carry weaponry. At the same time, however, Britain was being strangled by the iron grip of German U-boats. In order to circumvent this, the British installed “disappearing guns” on their merchant ships; guns were placed beneath trapdoors that would spring open and allow the guns to return fire when the U-boats approached. Often times U-boats, believing them to be helpless merchant ships, would approach ships armed with disappearing guns, only to be forced to turn away by the ships terrifying firepower. For the Germans, their inability to understand that the way something is isn’t always the same as reality cost them countless lives and U-boats.
The story Of Mice and Men also provides examples of how what something seems to be isn’t the same as reality. One of the main characters, Lennie, is a gigantic man who overshadows all of the others. However, despite his aggressive outward appearance, Lennie is a kind, sensitive, and passive man. Throughout the story, one of Lennie’s obsessions is to have a rabbit farm, an ambition completely out of step with his outward appearance. This clear discrepancy between outward appearance and reality perfectly illustrates how the way things seem isn’t always what’s real.
Imagine a world where things appear and disappear randomly, you can’t know for sure where you are, and teleportation and time travel are possible. Welcome to to fantastic, and completely real world of quantum mechanics. This strange set of laws (which have proven flawless in predicting reality) is the paragon of how what we see is not what we get. At the scale of atoms, what we see is never reality; particles masquerade as each other, disappear when we try and observe them, and can exist at two places at once. What this mind-boggling set of laws shows is that what is observed can often be completely incoherent with what’s actually there.
When one analyzes the pattern of disappearing guns, Lennie from Of Mice and Men, and the world of quantum mechanics, an indisputable pattern becomes clear: the way something seems is not the same as what it actually is. One must be careful not to be deceived by he way a thing appears for the exact opposite may be true.

Once again, thank you in advance!