"The SAT and ACT essay tests began with fanfare in 2005, a bid to assess the writing chops of college-bound students under the pressure of a clock.
Now, many colleges say time’s up for those exams. With a few notable exceptions, the consensus in higher education is that the tests are becoming an afterthought even though hundreds of thousands of high school students still take them every year as one of the grinding rituals on the road to college.
One by one, major schools this year are dropping their requirements for prospective students to submit an essay score from the national testing services. Princeton and Stanford universities last week became the latest to end the mandate, following Dartmouth College and Harvard and Yale universities.
Those schools are dropping the requirement because they wanted to ensure that the extra cost of essay testing did not drive applicants away. Others have resisted requiring the essays because they doubted the exercise revealed much." …
But since a student may not know which schools they plan to apply to, not taking the essay portion could be detrimental. Plus there may be some scholarships that want to see complete standardized test scores.
They say “As of July 2018, Caltech no longer requires the SAT Essay or ACT Writing exam sections. Additionally, these sections will not be considered in the application review process” [http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/content/standardized-tests, emphasis mine] and “Writing and communications skills are valued highly by Caltech and will continue to be evaluated through the information collected in the SAT/ACT verbal sections as well as through required application essays.” Caltech’s application requires 6 essays in addition to the Common App essay.
Until the University of California follows suit, students in California will still need to that the SAT and ACT with essay.
I’m guessing that this was largely caused when adcoms saw the ACT rescoring irregularities when they temporarily went to a 36-point essay. Students who requested rescoring revealed that there’s a large error bar in essay scoring.
The essay was the most coachable part of the SAT, I felt. There was (is) a formula to the grading of it. Google prepping for the essay, example links won’t post here.