Hi everyone this is my first time using this account. I don’t have any idea about how the SAT essay grading will work but I wrote my first timed essay using the following prompt and I would appreciate if you guys would grade it out of 12 and provide any feedback. Thanks! 
Prompt: Do people need discipline to achieve freedom?
Essay:
For the idealistic notion of freedom to become a tangible reality, the paramount importance of the integration of discipline within one’s life is undeniable. The implementation of discipline into one’s daily thoughts, action, practices, and behaviors sets the parameters for ultimate freedom and success. My father’s inspiring story, in itself, exemplifies the latter statement.
Born in the poverty stricken streets of Islamabad, Pakistan in early 1968, my father was the youngest of ten children. Pakistan’s lack of infrastructure and little importance on education meant my father spent much of his childhood playing cricket and participating in dangerous endeavors with other rowdy neighborhood boys, rather than in a classroom learning his alphabet and numbers.
The turning point came in grade nine when, on the day of his board exams, a “friend” placed a brand new, sharp knife upright on his chair a split second before my father took his seat. He recalls the pain as both surreal and blindly excruciating. Unable to complete the exam, my father was rushed to the hospital, where he was refused treatment because his poor family was unable to pay the medical fee. After a night of torturous pain, my father’s father called a distant friend who worked in a nearby town as a doctor. My father was driven in a rickshaw through the dirty streets of Karachi and through hilly breaks in rising mountains as the first peaks of dawn broke through the sky.
He spent the next three months with the doctor in the neighboring town, recovering from his injury and learning about medicine, and the significance of education, both to an individual, and to society. That doctor encouraged my father to be the change for his family, to work hard, and to build the better life that he deserved.
Over the course of the next six years, my father re-sat his board exams, was admitted into a local medical school, and then studied diligently in his little rooftop bedroom from daybreak to midnight. When he was admitted to Loyola University Residency Program in 1995 in Chicago, Illinois, his family broke down in tears. This was the first time any individual in the family had grown up to become anything more than a market stall owner.
Today, my father is a very well respected Cardiologist at a large hospital, spending any amount of hours necessary to provide superior care to patients in need. His unfathomable effort, remarkable discipline, and sheer perseverance has allowed him to free himself from the vicious grasp of poverty, hunger, and desolation while giving my mother, my siblings, and I the life he could only have dreamed of when he was a child. His story personifies discipline as a catalyst for freedom.