Please Grade my SAT Essay. Thanks.

Do people accomplish more when they are allowed to do things in their own way? 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.

Note: Please treat this like an essay you would usually write under pressure in 25 minutes, not as a final draft essay.

I believe that people can accomplish more if they are allowed to do things their own way. This is true because one may have a clear plan on how to approach a problem or maybe is an expert within the field. I exemplify this reasoning by two personal experiences; one when working as part of a team and another with my daily math homework.

During the 9th grade year in high school, I was introduced to the concept of collaboration by working as part of a team. As a result, I was exposed to different types of ideas that everyone in my team had; some were beneficial while others were ineffective. This was exactly what happened when I was assigned to my robot building group for my design and technology class. As soon as we began formulating our thoughts; everyone seemed to waiver between many different ideas. Consequently, the team was not going anywhere, in terms of progress. However, I wanted to change that so I took a leadership position because I had a foreseeable direction to where I wanted to take the team. Under this type of efficient leadership, I was able to guide my team from buying the robot’s materials, to assembling it from scratch. So, we were able to finish the project and get a good grade at the same time.

Another year later, in the 10th grade, I was working on my daily math homework at school. However, I have never been good at math so I was stuck on factoring quadratic expressions. I asked my best friend, Gregory, to help me. Gregory, who had the highest grade in my Algebra II class, was one of the best students who is excellent at understanding math and performing mathematical operations. As a result, he was able to guide me by showing me how he approached factoring in a completely different way. This type of expertise he had with math allowed me to finish my long math homework, an assignment that I initially thought was difficult.

All in all, I certainly do believe that allowing one to accomplish tasks their own way would progress the task at hand much faster. From my personal experiences, this ability depends on knowing a clear approach to a problem and a certain type of expertise one may have toward the subject. Any of these traits would allow someone to accomplish tasks much faster than if they didn’t have them.

@IBGuy101 Your first example is good (“I was able to guide my team…”) but the second example seems irrelevant to me. It is not “your own” way of factoring, and it probably isn’t Gregory’s either. Unless your teacher forced you to factor the really slow way, I’m not sure if the second example fits really well within the prompt.

Remember that you can also use examples from literature, current events, what you’ve seen on TV, etc. I can think of an example from Kitchen Nightmares that fits this prompt perfectly.

There are a few small grammatical errors.

It’s not clear what “this” refers to.

The correct word is “waver.”

“Their” is plural; “one” is singular. Either replace “one” with something plural, or replace “their” with “his or her.”

@MITer94 Thanks for your suggestions and inputs. What score would you give this out of 12? Again, thanks!

@IBGuy101 most likely an 8.