I have a tutoring client, where the student is starting out about 530 in each section. The mother said don’t tutor in writing, because the schools don’t look at it. I usually find writing is the easiest area to make improvement in, although my strongest area is math, so I usually spend more time on writing at first with a student with scores like that. Is it true schools don’t look at writing? I am wondering how to handle this situation, as well as other clients.
Some schools do, some don’t. Mine uses it for placement.
The mother is mostly right. Many colleges mainly look at the CR and M. But every college is different, so you really need to ask the mother what colleges she’s considering applying to. Then go online and see what the requirements are for those colleges (or call them directly).
Writing is the easiest part of the SAT to improve quickly and usually is the highest (but these College Confidential students are the exception: this crowd does well across the board!)
Test Prep companies are slick. They never tell anyone that most colleges don’t care about Writing, but boast that they can get your score to improve 300 pts! What they don’t tell you is that 200 of those pts came from W. And very little came from CR.
In my experience tutoring, writing is the easiest to get improvement on and critical reading the hardest.
Some schools don’t look at W at all, many schools de-emphasize W, and some schools treat it as an equal of CR and M. The middle group is the largest.