<p>I know they have access to it, but do colleges actually take the time to read your SAT essay?</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of a college considering the SAT essay during the admissions process - beyond the score, of course. If you think about the amount of information they’ve already amassed on applicants, another pile of essays to read seems unecessarily punitive to adcoms who are already working fifteen hour days.</p>
<p>Supposedly the reason the SAT essay is available to colleges is so that they can compare your timed essay to your application essays to determine if the writing styles match. The purpose is to determine if you actually wrote your application essays. I have no idea if the colleges are actually implementing this, but that is the purpose.</p>
<p>^ The funny thing about that is that the top scorers on the essay usually follow a strict format and throw in certain key words in ways that bear little resemblance of their true writing styles.</p>
<p>Every Admissions Dean that was asked that question had exactly the same response – its physically impossible to read the essays since they are all written in pencil and that doesnot translate well into transmitting them electronically from College Board to colleges. Colleges have been known to randomly check the essays, but the difficulty in reading them prevents every essay to be looked at. And to carry this further, at least from the admission heads I spoke with, they all as one person talked of the SAT scores in terms of a score of 1,600. Which tells you about their attitude toward the new scoring.</p>