I’m wondering how bad is it if you pursue a specific strategy on the essay, namely, Thesis, extended example, conclusion.
This works, from what I’m told, but I made a mistake by omitting examples within the example; i.e, the thesis was intentionally nuanced, but only the first part of the thesis was argued with evidence, whereas the second part was argued more with assertion. I would prefer a 12, but now I’m worried this’ll take things down to an 8.
I wouldn’t worry about it that much. If your writing is great (free of major mistakes, cohesive, etc.), you might have a shot at a 10 even with such ‘mistake’. But really, your grade depends more on who’s reading it (and the way you present things). I have seen essays I thought were flawless receive an 8, while some friends of mine who wrote some random information (terrible essays in our opinion) got a 11.
Well, it’s highly subjective grading done over a 2-3 minute read. It’s been too long for me to reconstruct my SAT essay, unfortunately, but with my technique and approach, provided that the grader can actually read it (half-size cursive to enable a fast writing speed), I should have been able to hit around 375 words (this time, I fully filled both pages so it’s possible I could have exceeded 400 words).
Unfortunately, going over what I do recall of the structure, it wasn’t that different than my 8 (~310 words), except a bit longer and mildly more in depth. I’m going over all the things I could have screwed up with the essay format, and it appears that I’m in the case where I’d be lucky to get a 10, and considering that I frequently screw up the writing section (despite getting a grammar book for the SAT, I typically get between 2-4 responses wrong), there’s little chance I’ll be able to obtain an 800 in the writing section.
Who knows, I could have gotten lucky this time; 0 responses wrong, a 10 would probably be sufficient to obtain an 800, but I’d expect -3.75 on the MC and an 8-10 on the essay.
Also, I sort of feel regretful that the essay section is being phased out. I actually like the essay format, no matter how restrictive. I’m a fan of the French Oulipo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo ) literary movement of constrained writing, and given the unique requirements of the essay format, it’s actually fun and challenging to work through essay prompts. The very things that make the essay flawed as a test of college writing ability are precisely what I enjoy about it; in an extremely short time period, you are given an abstract prompt for which you are expected to discuss with some semblance of intelligence, and not only that, there’s a strong correlation between scores and essay lengths, as well as the fact that the scorers are not allowed to fact check.
For me, the SAT essay is less of a test of literary or academic writing and more of a special puzzle, something evocative both of a sonnet (in the sense of working within harsh constraints) and the Imperial Chinese Eight-Legged Essay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay ), which was yet another form of constrained writing, testing for adherence and mastery of a specific writing style. I am sad that I won’t be able to obtain a 12 in my last administration; a demonstration that I had solved the puzzle.