Please Grade My First SAT Essay!

<p>Learning and doing are their own rewards. No external rewards are required. Yet when external rewards are introduced—whether attention and praise from parents or prizes from teachers—these rewards exert a substantial influence. Instead of reading books to find out about the world, kids will read to win prizes. Kids will produce for rewards, but the quality of their activity and their interest in it will be dramatically altered.</p>

<p>Adapted from Barry Schwartz, The Costs of Living</p>

<p>Assignment: Is it wrong or harmful to motivate people to learn or achieve something by offering them rewards? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.</p>

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<pre><code> Motivating people to learn or achieve something by offering them rewards is a sure-fire way for making people eager, interested, and joyful, in something, that previously, they may not had has the incentive or motivation to do. Several examples from history and current events pellucidly indicate that by motivating people to learn or achieve something through incentives has always been at the crux of a successful individual and community.

In his novel The Hindered Journey, Robin Sprowsky recounts an event that took place between his parents and him when he was a fourteen year old teenager. He writes, “I had just come back from school, and walked morosely into the house with my report card from school in my hand. My grades were all D's, except for one C, in science, my favorite subject. After having a long talk with my angry parents, they proposed to me that they would take me on a trip to California if I raised my grades. This was the beginning of my journey." Sprowsky graduated from Harvard in 2000, and is now a successful marine biologist. Therefore, Robin Sprowsky is living proof that motivation through incentives can positively impact an individual.

The overthrowing of the tyrannical regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is a historical event that has powerfully and profoundly depicted how motivation through auxiliary incentives can dramatically change the demeanor of people towards a topic. The Egyptian people's wanting to overthrow the regime was not only because of the countless souls that were massacred during the reign of the regime, but also it was\as because of a burning incentive for a better life for themselves and for the future Egyptian generations. Thus, again, we see the powerful impact of incentives towards people’s motivation.

After a careful analysis of Robin Sprowsky's personal journey, and the uprising of the Egyptian people, one can vividly see that motivation through rewards and incentives is, indeed, a gargantuan factor in the development of individuals and societies. Rewards and incentives are like a light in a dark tunnel that will guide anyone willing to be guided.
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<p>Please grade this essay as an official SAT essay grader would. this includes not checking any of the facts. I'm looking forward to all of your scores. Thanks in advance! :)</p>

<p>bump…anyone?</p>

<p>Did you write this under SAT exam conditions? Is the long quote in your first example one that you recalled from memory. If not then I encourage you to rewrite that paragraph. Rephrase the quote as best you can, or restructure the example so that it does not require a direct quote.</p>

<p>Your second example is in my opinion off topic. The intent of the essay is to relate an external reward with an action. The desire for freedom is not such a reward. It’s innate and self defined.</p>

<p>It’s difficult to grade this essay. My advise for you is to study several real high scoring essay examples and retry. Write the essay under SAT exam conditions.</p>

<p>Nice references to Egypt! I’m egyptian and I usually use Anwar Al-Sadat as an example :p. Lol anyways, you have all summary and no analysis in your first body paragraph. And it’s somewhat strange that you just memorized the quote and put it into your essay. The second paragraph has analysis but it doesn’t pertain to the thesis at all! My advice is to look up a few potential examples for the essay beforehand so your “example library” grows and you can choose a specific example to help support your thesis. Once you master this, see if doing 3 examples helps (alot of space is taken up by that quote)</p>

<p>On a different note, your intro and conclusion paragraphs are really good, but it probably wouldn’t help you because your body doesn’t support your thesis. </p>

<p>Probably an 8 or 9.</p>