I took a complete mock SAT with a timer, and this is the essay I handwrote. Thoughts and a rating would be greatly appreciated.
Prompt:
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
"Knowledge is power. In agriculture, medicine, and industry, for example, knowledge has liberated us from hunger, disease, and tedious labor. Today, however, our knowledge has become so powerful that it is beyond our control. We know how to do many things, but we do not know where, when, or even whether this know-how should be used.?
Assignment: Can knowledge be a burden rather than a benefit? 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.
Without a doubt, there is a strong relationship between knowledge and power. Those that have insight can use it to gain wealth, responsibility, influence over others. The relationship holds the other way as well; those individuals fortunate enough to be in possession of power quickly lose it if they are also in possession of ignorance.
The reality is that not all knowledge is power. All one has to do to see this is to look at our current state of affairs; we have access to a seemingly-boundless quantity of information, and yet, we are largely unable to make sense of it. We are bombarded with useless information - which celebrities embarrassed themselves this week comes to mind - but even seemingly useful information can be useless if there is no useful way to synthesize it and deploy it in our day-to-day lives. Googled instructions for how to repair a bicycle are instantly forgotten once the task is completed. Directions to a friend’s house are still not remembered after the tenth visit. We are assaulted with so much information that our brains give up trying to hold on to any of it until we can convince it through a dozen repetitions that yes, it actually is information worth remembering.
And along with the useless knowledge and the excessive volume of knowledge that we aren’t able to mentally manage is the knowledge which is quite simply harmful. Learning how to make drugs out of grocery store ingredients doesn’t make you more powerful; it makes you susceptible to pure human weakness. Learning how to cheat on an exam doesn’t make you more powerful; it cheats you out of the education process, in all its challenging authenticity.
Then we ask, what sort of knowledge actually is power? Purposeful knowledge; focused knowledge; knowledge that can be directed toward a grander purpose. A grander purpose than simply browsing celebrity gossip on the internet or being deluged by marketing advertisements on television.