<p>Is it important to Question the ideas and decisions of people in authority claim to be true?</p>
<pre><code> In order for a society to advance, it must challenge the ideas of its leaders. Several examples from film, history, and personal experience clearly demonstrate that it is necessary to question authority.
In the film Gladiator, Maximus Decimus is a Roman slave who is forced to do battle for the entertainment of his people. Maximus does not believe in the direction the current emperor is taking his beloved country. He fights as a gladiator for his own survival, but he defies his emperor by refusing to finish off his defeated opponents. By showing resistance to authority, Maximus wins the heart of his people and causes a revolution to occur.
Another example of the opposition of authority is the 1900's court case of North East School District Vs. A.F.. A.F., a sixteen year old boy in high school, refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before school every morning. The school district takes him to court where the supreme court rules in favor of A.F. because he was within his rights by not saying the pledge. By standing up for what he believed in, A.F. secured the rights guaranteed to him and set a precedent for the rest of the country to follow in similar cases.
When I was twelve years old and a seventh grader in middle school, I joined the school theater club. It was accepted within the club that each certain person would be assigned their selected role based on popularity. I, being one of the less popular kids, objected to this rule and tried out for the lead role of Frankenstein in our first play. I eventually won the spot and was accepted by others for standing up against our group leaders.
Despite Maximus' situation, he was able to bring about change by defying authority, similar to how I was able to by also challenging the rules. These examples prove that you must challenge authority to bring change.
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<p>I made up the last two but I've heard you're allowed to so I hope that doesn't affect the score.</p>
<p>please this is my last day and i would like to know where i stand</p>
<p>I’d give it a 8-9 (out of 12). Most of your body paragraphs was just your stating your example and connecting it to the prompt in a general way. You should do more critical thinking, reasoning, and analyzing. The conclusion doesn’t add anything to the essay, so omit it and work more on your body paragraphs. The intro is good because it is short and to the point. The graders don’t care about what happened in a film or what happened in a historical or personal event as much as they care about how you use them in your argument. One thing you can do is to be more technical. For example, in your first body paragraph, you said that Maximus’s defiance of the emperor led to great consequences. You can say that something that is important is, by DEFINITION, something that causes great consequences (e.g., “an important event in history”). Stating the definition of the word “important” in the prompt makes the example and your argument pop out more because it makes logical sense. Logic has to do with reasoning, which is what the graders are looking for on the SAT, which is a reasoning test. It’s less about what you know beforehand about your examples and more about how you can connect them in a logical, reasoning way to the question in the prompt.</p>
<p>The third example is problematic since “others” aren’t necessarily “people in authority.” It seems forced. You would benefit from strengthening the other two examples and omitting the third one. Like I said, it doesn’t matter how much memorized content or examples you put into the essay. It’s about the quality of the examples and your critical thinking.</p>
<p>thanks a lot crazybandit I’ll try to keep everything close to the thesis
anyone else?</p>
<p>I agree, try to transition your examples. They seem broken up and at the end of each paragraph you aren’t relating back to your thesis as much as you should</p>
<p>Thanks for the feedback!</p>
<p>As I wrote it I knew my transitions were weak(or didn’t even exist), could you please suggest some good example transitions?</p>
<p>Anyone else?</p>