Hey guys, I’m very worried. I just took my sat today and without going into too much detail due to legal reasons, we had an essay involving “compromise”. I was happy and thought I knew what compromise meant, and wrote a good essay. Turns out I thought it means like to do something to benefit but at the risk of something else. ( an example of how I understood compromise is former slave for example who risks death to escape slavery). Turns out it doesn’t mean that. I mean I didn’t write about camels or something but I wasn’t exactly on topic. Should I be worried about a zero?
Probably not a zero, but maybe a 5 or 6.
I wouldn’t worry. I’d imagine they reserve the “0” score for essays that were written beforehand. For example, if I (for whatever reason) decided to memorize a past essay that scored 12, and then just spit it out on the actual exam.
Actually, even that is unlikely to receive a 0, which is usually reserved for blank pages, essays in other languages, or writing that doesn’t relate to the prompt in any conceivable way (like a laundry list or a litany of reasons the SAT sucks).
Don’t worry, really. Being an open-ended topic as the SAT essay prompts are, you shouldn’t be expecting a zero unless you went completely off-topic (which doesn’t appear to be your case). If it’s well written and has decent points, your essay will probably end up to get a 7, maybe 8. As @MITer94 and @marvin100 mentioned, zeros are indeed reserved for essays written beforehand, in other languages, or not related to the prompt at all (imagine this as a grocery list, a letter to the readers, etc.)
(fwiw I’ve seen scores as low as 5 for essays that, while written well, suffered from major logical flaws like circular reasoning or inadvertently supporting the antithesis.)
@marvin100 I got a 4 for the essay last month. Yes you heard me it is a four, I double and triple checked. (If there might be any reasons associated with that, my (almost) unintelligible handwriting is definitely one)
I remember way back in the day, I took the SAT’s and wrote a bunch of nonsense with big words and complex sounding sentences. The essay had very little to do with the prompt, and I ended up scoring a 12. I wouldn’t be worried quite yet.
It’s well known that the strongest covariates for scoring well on the essay is length (of both essay and words used).