<p>The prompt was something about "Do photographs show real life, or are they artistic creations or something blah blah"</p>
<p>For people who took the test today, i was wondering if this is off topic.</p>
<p>All my friends said i was off topic and i was gonna get a 0.
I didn't write about photographs literally; i interpreted a photograph as a preconceived belief unique to every individual. And my example was how martin luther king jr had a photograph in his mind that all african americans were treated with equal respect. And the "photograph" in his mind motivated him to advocate their rights. etc... </p>
<p>IS THIS OFF TOPIC?! thanks. and ask questions if you need me to clarify</p>
<p>No, as long as you defined this sense of a photograph in your thesis (not necessarily explicitly, but if you hinted at least) you’ll be fine…
This policy is to ensure that you don’t start writing an essay that has no relevance whatsoever to the topic… essentially doesn’t want people making up essays beforehand and using them (although that’s fairly doable by most CCers). - atleast that’s my impression.</p>
<p>Thanks but i mean is this not even 8 material?</p>
<p>Not to be a jerk, but in short: yes, it is off topic. The prompt asked about photographs - literal, tangible photographs. I dont know why so many people are twisting the prompts this year.</p>
<p>I don’t think you’ll get a 0, as you did re-define photography and write a thoughtful essay about it. But I would be surprised if you can get anything higher than a 4 - the prompt was pretty specific, and you basically dodged it in order to write about something tangential that was more up your alley.</p>
<p>As for why people dodged this prompt…I think it was a rather unusual one in that it was quite specific, and most people have little to no experience or knowledge of photography-art, so it’s hard to apply real life examples. I didn’t have any real life experience to apply, so I ended up just trying to create great visual images, using vivid words to describe images like a hummingbird and a waterfall, and discussing how a skilled photographer could use the tools at his disposal to evoke any number of emotions in the viewer. However, I’m still not sure whether that’s totally what they were looking for.</p>
<p>do you mean 4 as in 4 of 12 or 8 of 12?</p>
<p>Sorry - I meant 4 for each - 8/12</p>
<p>You gotta remember, those first few points are low hanging fruit. There are people that turn in short, one paragraph blobs with terrible spelling and grammar. If you’re fairly intelligent, you have to work hard to get less than 3 for each essay, imo.</p>
<p>okay thats relieving. and i wrote a little bit less than 1.5 pages. is that bad?</p>
<p>As long as your interpretation of the word “photograph” contained the comparable traits to what most people think of as a photograph, then you were not off-topic. In fact, if you conveyed poignant examples, I’d give you a top score for thinking outside the box.</p>