Hi all!
I have been trying to find out a way to score my essay until I came to this forum.
Could you all please tell me what my score is for the essay below and explain why? Please grade as subjectively as you can.
Thanks!!!
SAT Prompt:
Do you believe that one should sacrifice life for liberty? 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.
Response:
I believe that one should sacrifice his life for liberty. While a life may sometimes be sacrificed in vain, the risks of letting the opportunity of having a lasting impact go by is much greater. The Warsaw Uprising is an example in which the lives that Jewish fighters sacrificed for liberty show that sometimes sacrifices have a lasting impact, but also the unwillingness of the Soviet people rising to sacrificing their lives in overthrowing Stalin amplifies the risks of becoming a bystander.
The Warsaw Uprising occurred in the midst of World War II, at a time when Germany was on the offensive against the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jewish fighters from the ghetto of Warsaw rose against their German oppressors in one of the few major acts of organized Jewish resistance. They fought so fiercely that Germany hat to divert regiments from fighting on the Eastern front to countering this internal threat instead. The rebellion was ended with the complete razing of the Warsaw Ghetto and with most of the surviving fighters being executed. The sacrifice of the fighters lives in an attempt to secure liberty weakened the Eastern German front, enabling the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany and restore freedom to those oppressed under Nazi rule. Thus, it shows that one should sacrifice their lives for freedom because it can enable the securing of the freedoms of others.
With the freedoms that the martyred fighters from Warsaw helped secure for others, it is easy to forget that the lack of action in sacrificing lives for freedom leads only to more tyranny and deaths as illustrated by the unwillingness of the Soviet people in sacrificing their lives to overthrow Stalin. Stalin was the most brutal dictator that the Soviet Union had seen, killing thousands of people monthly. Freedoms of speech were suppressed, and the Soviet Union was a police state. The people wanted to overthrow the hated Stalin, but they knew that it would require the sacrificing of their lives. They were not willing to part with it, and Stalin was able to continue his reign of terror uninterrupted, being enabled to kill millions through the silence of the people. Had those people risen up, knowing that their lives will be sacrificed for the freedom of their comrades, Stalin would have been deposed. The lives of millions would have been saved.
The fighters in the Warsaw Uprising sacrificed their lives for the securing of freedoms for millions that were oppressed by Nazi rule. The people of the Soviet Union could have sacrificed their lives in attempting to overthrow Stalin, but they valued their lives more. Sacrificing one’s life leads to the securing of freedoms for others; the risks of not acting at all can be disasterous.