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What do you mean by a strong thesis? Do you mean a very straight-forward, opinionated one? Could you give us the one you used in the March SAT?
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A thesis needs to be consistent, and the bulk of the paper should be spent supporting it. I didn't think the topic was as clear-cut as that, and therefore ended up with something like "Majority rule can be a very bad thing...but if you look at this example you can see that sometimes it's in fact quite useful...it depends, really...just make sure it doesn't oppress the minority." Except, of course, much more verbose.</p>
<p>You can pay to have your essay rescored, correct?
I wouldn't actually do that, but I'm wondering..can they rescore it a worse score? That would be funny..you pay $30 or whatever to get a worse score..</p>
<p>I was wondering the same thing...but it's possible...if they didn't, and somebody repeatedly got it rescored, everybody would eventually get a good score...unless their essay was horrible. It does seem unfair though, the grading is opinionated and not standardized...I don't think it was a good idea to add an essay...the writing section, ok, but an essay?</p>
<p>The thing about the essay is that it's impossible to fake good writing. If you're unable to put together a coherent sentence, that's going to be evident. I think that's important, but it's impossible to implement it in a way that would be fair, which is a serious problem.</p>
<p>Really? Hearing the scores my friends got, i thought the grading was harsh, but for me, it went easily. I didn't even finish yet got a 8 (which many of my friends got, and they're much much better writers than I). Writing's my weakest, too</p>
<p>It's not enough to be a good writer it seems. I think most people who have theirs rescored will get the same score. I've heard several complaints about Kaplan's writing services, where they taught you how to write it, and no one the people who took this course got good grades.</p>
<p>I thought I wrote a well thought out essay (Slavery, The Crucible and All Quiet On The Western Front a la Princeton Review method) and I got an 8. I was ****ED. Can we get it rescored? I would pay for it to get rescored. I sincerely thought I wrote a good essay.</p>
<p>i wrote the exact same thing you wrote missamericanpie. i used slavery, the crucible, and the japanese internment camps. i thought my essay was awesome and like you only got an 8.</p>
<p>I had the west-coast 'creativity today' one and got a 11 and an 800 on the section (which surprised me, incidentally, because I did a lot of guessing on the MC). I know one person with a twelve, and another with a ten... I used three examples/body paragraphs, taking the 'in the world today' VERY literally... Examples: war on terror = need new methods, human rights protection = need new conception of national sovereignty and when interference is allowed, and I forget the last...</p>
<p>The essay grading seems pretty arbitrary to me... XP</p>
<p>I wrote it wordy, got a little bogged down in clarification, had a one sentence conclusion, threw in a few vocab words - and got an 11. I think that they just want to see how well you flow. My examples were Socrates (I can't believe nobody's mentioned this one yet) , Student Council election (specific example of somebody i know) , and creationism (elected officials vs. scientists). Apparently that shouldn't have worked? That's why i think natural flow comes in.</p>
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I think that they just want to see how well you flow. [...] That's why i think natural flow comes in.
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<p>That's what I would've thought, too, but then my score would definitely be higher than a 9 (the flow being one of the things that actually worked).</p>
<p>Yeah, I did that. Still got an 8. The more I think about it, I got really unlucky and got two hard graders. This grading mistake will be corrected though through the essay scoring service. If its not, I'll just keep having them rescore it. I haven't found anything that says a set limit on this. Its also hard to find information about the rescoring. SOmething tells me that the collegeboard does not want too many people knowing about this service. The majority of the population does not question, but follows.</p>
<p>I was under the impression you could only rescore it once, & if your scores comes up as higher or lower so be it. But I don't know that much abt that I could be wrong.</p>