Lying in the SAT essay--unethical?

<p>i dont remember the directions saying whether your examples have to be real...</p>

<p>I Sure Lied!!!!</p>

<p>I made up a novel by JD Salinger that doesn't exist. I called it "The Longer of Ashville" I molded it to perfectly fit the essay. I hope they don't take off points because it obviously doesn't exist.</p>

<p>Lying is totally unethical. </p>

<p>Plus, collegeboard has said that colleges can pull up your written essay and read it. If you lie to better your score, then that reflects poorly on your character and they will see that.</p>

<p>How is it unethical? You aren't lying, you are making up facts creatively for an essay. Sparknotes book actually SAYS to make up facts if you can't think of some, or embelish. I don't find it unethical at all.</p>

<p>By the way, why the hell would a college waste their time reading your SAT essay? Most good colleges barely spend any time reading your essay for their school.</p>

<p>Why would making up a situation on the SAT be unethical? Now, if you make up something about yourself on a college admission essay: that's unethical. Besides, if you don't use "I" and if you make it a clearly hypothetical example, there definitely is nothing wrong with that on the SAT.</p>

<p>For the love of god, you are allowed to make up examples . They DO NOT grade the veracity of your facts but your writing skills and how well you tie in this "fact" with your thesis. So go ahead and lie all you want so that you can get a 12. Period.</p>

<p>There is a disconnect in the argument here.
My question is: Can you and should you make up historical, and literary facts? Can you make up stuff about anything, if it is outside of your personal life?
I personally would think not. I am not asking about the ethicality of doing so, but the practicality, as in graders docking you for making up wars. I personally think it should not be admissible, as making up things outside your personal life is just retarded. The Franco-Indonesian war of 1956??? Maybe the CB writers allow for alternate reality fiction.
I do agree though with fabricating personal anecdotes.
Devils, isn't JD Salinger known as a one hit wonder? Hell if i made that lie it would take me 20 minutes just to name a book.</p>

<p>You can lie but definitely not 'lie all you want'</p>

<p>I would not lie about anything outside of your personal life. It's okay if your facts are not perfectly 'factual' though. </p>

<p>Base your lies off of something real and exaggerate a little if you can. Don't lie about something way off or touchy.</p>

<p>i've never heard of colleges being able to pull up your essay from the SATs, i don't even think they can do that</p>

<p>i think small lies are okay, but not like making up something really far out there and anyways they're testing your writing abilities and your ability to support your stance, not how many pompous idiots you can name from history. anyways, i think it would be too hard to make up something very quickly.</p>

<p>by the way, JD Salinger was known for "Nine Stories", "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction", and he was NOT a one hit wonder</p>

<p>At any rate, I figure that if you have a plethora of examples in mind before you even actually take the essay section of the New SAT, then you could "bend" those examples in order for them to fit your interpretation/stance on the essay topic. Honestly, I was going to lie on the essay (due to time constraints), but I was able to come up with a valid example... I barely filled up all the lines.</p>

<p>I don't see anything wrong with making up examples; being able to think up a situation that is relevant to and supportive of your thesis is just as valuable as recognizing an example in history or literature.</p>

<p>That said, I probably wouldn't make up facts about someone as famous as JD Salinger, or use an event as recent as 1956. Go further back in history, or choose a more obscure author and refer to him as "the renowned (author)"; that will make you seem all the more worldly and pretty much eliminate the possiblity of a reader catching you. Because even if readers are not supposed to take off for lies, it isn't going to reflect well upon your essay either.</p>

<p>is it THAT important to fill up the lines? I have small handwriting and had 1.2 pages</p>

<p>JD Salinger has a lot of books, but he just isn't as well known for them. Most authors have written a lot of books, and there is no possible way the graders could know all of them, so if they were to give you a "bad" score just for lying, and in fact they were wrong, that could be a problem. That is most likely why they don't grade based on fact. They have 1 min to read your essay, they don't have time to look stuff up.</p>

<p>It is ethical to make stuff up on the SAT writing. It is unethical to make stuff up on your college admissions essays.</p>

<p>Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories are both amazing books.</p>

<p>It is totally okay to lie, or rather, to do some "creative" writing. The essay scorers spend about 1-2 minutes on each essay, and believe me, they are not being paid to cross check every fact with an encyclopedia. However, an essay filled with facts dosnt always give you a 6, rather, it is how you write. The scorers are more interested in seeing that you can write witha good vocabulary and connect your ideas and all that writing stuff. So, make up whatever you want, as long as it is within reason (nothing like, i invented...) but if you need to create some sort of a personal experience and you can do so in a way that is cogent to the topic then voila, you are a good writer. It is a test of how well you can write, not about how well you can remember facts, dates, names, places, and how interesting of experiences you have. So make up whatever you want, but just dont make up vocabulary!</p>

<p>Hahahahaha, I lied in a whole paragraph (out of a total of 5) on Saturday...then tried to tie my entire essay together with a fake quote by "anonymous"...my prompt was on creativity so I wrote something like, "An anonymous person once wrote 'Creativity is only the beginning.'" or something lame like that. I'm pretty sure no one has ever said that before either. My whole essay was a lie. :P</p>

<p>hehe, nice! well done</p>