<p>ESSAY PROMPT
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment:</p>
<p>Mistakes we have made in the past are supposed to make us wiser, stronger, and better able to deal with the future. This approach suggests that we should continue to focus on our mistakes, that we should remember them, no matter how painful or embarrassing to us they may be. But nothing is to be gained by concerning ourselves with old mistakes. We should forget them as soon as possible.</p>
<p>ASSIGNMENT: Is it best to forget about past mistakes as soon as possible? 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>
<p>You tried to use historical and literature examples so much, you didn’t give a good reason!!! Your handwriting is a little bit illegible but however everything else is good but I’ll say an 8 or who know maybe a 9.</p>
<p>it should be a high-scoring essay. Your use of literary and historical examples shows the graders that you actually learned something in school, rather than just writing about a movie you saw on television. I heard somewhere that quantity was more important than quality, and you clearly used all the space given to write your essay. I’d give it a 10 - 11, but it’s not perfect.</p>
<p>college confidential users are all crazy stingy with everything…especially essay grading. If you fill up the pages, have a decent smoothness and use three examples its hard to get below a 9.</p>
<p>@seekere- I got an 8 with two pages filled. Then again, I did make up some stuff that would be obviously incorrect, so maybe that’s why I lost points.</p>
<p>The internet and related phenomena brought a new paradigm to society: the impersonality of relations. Whereas people believe that, through staggering levels of connection and increasing nominal references to friendship, they are indeed being social and bounding, in reality, those facts negatively affect notions of privacy and self-respect.
Firstly, it is important to mention that, along with these so called virtual friendships, society faces tradeoffs that have that terms “safety” and “solidity” as ends of the dichotomies. When people share more than they should with strangers believed to be friends, details of their lives are exposed not only to predators - which represent the most conspicuous threat to social safety - but this set of actions also undermines other fields of social interaction, such as people’s careers, families and academics. That is easily seen in the impairment of teacher-student relationships and in details of professional affairs.
European sociologist Zygmunt Bauman remembers that, even though the raw number of friends increases when a mechanism such as Facebook is used, the distance between the poles of social intercourse rather influences the actual validity of their relation. Bauman argues that people could be displayed in a “continuum” of the possibilities of relationship and the increasing distance between two determined people engaging in this phenomenon would represent mostly stigmas and stereotypes, in a clear attempt to fill voids in today’s rushed lives, weakening real bounds.
Other experiment that might help understanding the odd situations in which individuals engage through self-exposure, mostly through social networking online, is trying to show your boss, your teacher, your grandmother or any other person you might have added to your profile the hypothetical pictures of last night’s party or that potential comment on how you pretended to be sick in order to avoid an appointment - and make sure to do that in person. As concreteness increases, self-exposure-people tend to notice the weirdness of some actions performed through virtual means.
The openness of today’s social relations is mainly due to the biased sense of distance. Social networks attempt to connect people besides the distance, but end up making connections through the distance. Relationships then become weaker and individuals engage in unusual exposure to fill the empty place. Society should stop acting irrationally and start looking for bounds closer: sometimes the real friendship is standing right next to you - in a place where you can trust to share and confess.</p>
<p>I’m posting here so I don’t have to open a new thread just for this… Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>I’m sorry, nystar, but the essay is an 8-9 at best. Factual errors aside, (Johnson didn’t resign. Nixon is the first and only US president to have resigned. And King didn’t forget about the past: the purpose of the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” was specifically to remind the Birmingham clergy of the past.) your essay had grammatical errors, spelling errors (as far as I could tell from the handwriting) and idiomatic errors. You also had some unfortunate choices in diction like “the post-war drought” and the country “going nowhere as it is (was)” after the 1929 stock market crash.</p>
<p>More to the point, your essay lacked development. </p>
<p>You note that bad memories “lurking” in the mind are bad for one, although you never support the assertion. You also mention that MLK and FDR “quickly learned” from their mistakes (without mentioning what they learned) and then moved on to the business of forgetting the past. I took that to have potential as another idea, but you seemed to mention it in passing and did not present it in your conclusion or in your introduction. You mention that Johnson “further hurt our economy after making this mistake” without telling what mistake he made. Finally, you mention FDR’s ‘new method of deficit spending’ without telling what that new method was or how it differed from the old method.</p>
<p>You need to learn what examples are for. Too many essays say, in effect, I have one idea. Here is an example of my one idea. Here is another example of my one idea. In conclusion, this is my one idea. </p>
<p>Another misuse of examples occurs when the writer says: My topic is about mistakes. Napoleon made a mistake. Now let me tell you all I know or can make up about Napoleon. </p>
<p>What they should say is: Here is my main idea. Here is an example that illustrates and explains more about that idea. Here is another example that adds even more consideration of other aspects of that idea. </p>
<p>On the whole, your essay was generally competent, but not outstanding. I don’t know who has rated your essays as 12’s in the past, but as an SAT essay rater myself, I can tell you for sure that this essay has a way to go before it rates a 10 - 12.</p>
<p>Wow. Thank you for the insight Wood5440, I appreciate the constructive criticism. I thought I was done practicing SAT essays, but I will make a strong effort to improve for the upcoming October SAT. </p>
<p>I didn’t understand the 12, especially since the first sentence uses “principle” instead of “principal”, along with the other grammatical errors you mentioned.</p>
<p>Johnson resigning was another mistake, I meant to convey that he did not run for reelection. As for “Letter from Birgmingham Jail”, MLK wanted to convey the poor treatment in the past, but strongly emphasized a new start, implying forgetting the past.</p>
<p>But yeah, I agree there were many errors. I feel like an 8 is a bit harsh but 9 seems justified after reading your comments.</p>
<p>I’ve thought about your essay several times over the past couple of days. The more I read it and your comments, the less sure I was of the score I gave it. So I reviewed my training materials to re-familiarize myself with the rubric and the quality of writing at each score level. I think you are right. I was being harsh. While I stand by the comments I wrote, I think my score assignment was low. </p>
<p>When I taught English, I tended to be easier on students who had more trouble with the work and a bit harder on students who were doing well. I felt the standards should be higher for those who could handle the challenge. But the SAT is not about my standards; it is about the scoring rubric set by ETS. When I rate SAT essays, I am not a teacher; I am a judge. Preserving that distinction is one of the hardest parts of the job for me. That’s why raters retrain every year and why ETS watches closely and lets raters know early when they start to deviate from the rubric.</p>
<p>On this board, though, I try to go back to being a teacher, which may be the reason I was so critical. I saw the places where your writing could improve. </p>
<p>If I criticized you in front of everyone on the board, I think I should acknowledge my error in front of everyone on the board. After all is said and done, I think your essay would have scored a 10. And I thank you for the pre-season wake up call.</p>
i want to see how well collegeboard grades them. ill tell you what i got afte</p>
