<p>Hey all,</p>
<p>Just curious as to how accurate the CB essay grader generally tends to be. My first time taking the SAT I spent the majority of my time writing an outline and was only able to actually write about a paragraph..I ended up with a 4/12 there, so today I took a CB practice test and took a different approach with the essay. I didn't proofread at all and was probably pretty redundant and contradictory here, but it'd be helpful if you guys could check out my essay and let me know what you'd grade it, because I'm having a hard time believing it'd be 12-worthy. This was my first attempt after that first time taking the SAT, and when I wrote this I had not yet studied any formulas or anything at all really, I just wrote what came to mind.</p>
<p>Prompt:</p>
<p>Nowadays nothing is private: our culture has become too confessional and self-expressive. People think that to hide one’s thoughts or feelings is to pretend not to have those thoughts or feelings. They assume that honesty requires one to express every inclination and impulse.</p>
<p>Adapted from J. David Velleman, "The Genesis of Shame"</p>
<p>Should people make more of an effort to keep some things private? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.</p>
<pre><code> In our society, it is often viewed as antisocial or rude to simply keep certain things to oneself. This notion is evident through popular culture as well as common interaction. Media portrayals of high school and college life in moves often denote the "cool kids" to be the more expressive, impulsive, and ultimately revealing characters, whereas the "weird" kids are often depicted as those who find solace in their own imagination, or who express themselves in any way that doesn't involve getting wasted and taking off their clothes. As popular music videos, movies and television shows discern this revealing way of living as today's societal norm, it becomes inherently clear that people should make more of an effort to keep some things private, or else this downward spiral of revealing and often sexually explicit "self expression" in the media will snowball until we are able to flick on a television set and find pornography on a major network.
If 21st century society can be defined by one facet of life, it is without a doubt the concept of image. Nearly everything in our society seems to be dictated by image as it is presented to us through mainstream media. For instance, over the years "gossip" magazines such as Seventeen and OK! have defined the ideal image of a sexy female. Unrealistic media representations such as those shown in these magazines have come to define us as a people, and this egregious idea of "normal" self-expression has had (and continues to have today) an enormous effect on all kinds of people.
For the past couple of months my school has been engaged in a debate regarding feminism and how gender can define ones place in society. Though women have seemingly always struggled for equality in our society, media objectification has never been a serious problem until now. One would presume that given the knowledge we have accumulated as a society over the last few decades, we would be making progress in an issue like gender equality rather than digressing, but sadly, for whatever reason, the latter has occurred. As long as overtly revealing, objectifying, and dominating images continue to dominate the media and define our generation, we will make progress neither with this issue nor with similar ones.
As the media has evolved in such a way as to subject people to certain ideals through commercials, TV, etc., we have, as a people, allowed for this to happen. As web goliaths such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google continue to collect information from everybody who signs up and agrees to their terms, we inherently forfeit any sense of privacy that we thought we still retained to products of the "confessional and self-expressive" culture defined by Velleman. As websites such as these go global, any possibility of keeping things private seems to be slowly vanishing. That being said, no effort to maintain privacy is in vain; numerous petitions to prohibit such websites from accessing and tracking our private information have become viral recently, and awareness is half the battle. The real question, however, is whether or not we can find and maintain a balance between social networking/media culture and privacy whilst retaining our integrity as independent people.
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