<p>i wrote about how my grandma gained new life from working for the neignborhood ( frankly, she never did anything, nor is there any "neignborhood")and how I set up my goal for life from working ( I hated that work so much)</p>
<p>hahah oh man..interesting... i bet they loved the grandma element. thats annoying, my tutor said not to write about personal stuff, so i wrote about one flew over the cuckoos nest and WWII...</p>
<p>I think that, if you are a competent writer, that you automatically tend to write more because you have greater confidence and organization in what you're writing. In my opinion, that's how the 12s are being achieved. We cannot dismiss the quality of the work based merely on length. Through length, the individual also has a greater opportunity to explain and support his position.</p>
<p>It's obvious that there is some bias--if the scorer sees a single page of work--it appears to be insufficient material. I think this whole length vs. score thing is being over-exaggerated by those who have a poor essay score and would like to blame it on time. The same could easily be said for all of the SAT.</p>
<p>the trick is that don't write fast and long, but write well.write a good paragraph with varied sentences, clear orgnization, rich evidence and some literary devices( similie, parallelism...)</p>
<p>perhaps more interesting is that many top tier colleges (which most of you are vying for) are now starting to question the validity of the writing portion of the SAT test. For example, i know MIT won't be taking either the writing section or the essay portion of the new Sat into consideration for admittance (until they're happy that about the validity of the test)</p>
<p>thats ******** about the time thing not being an excuse.
i know i'm a good writer, but i do have problems with time constraints. giving someone 25 minutes to develop and write an essay about something random like work is not a natural test of writing skills.</p>
<p>I agree with you hilary, the time thing doesn't give you a chance to truly show your abilities, and there will be very few instances in our lives when we are told to write something about a topic we've never seen before in 25 minutes.</p>
<p>My essay:
~1.75 pages (it had no conclusion, ran out of time)
12 (I guess conclusions aren't that important :))</p>
<p>I filled up about 1 and 2/3rds pages in May. However, I have large handwriting and skipped lines between paragraphs. I only wrote 4 paragraphs and got a 12. My handwriting is also fairly messy, too.</p>
<p>but jmarsh--having a 12, as you do--although it doesn't validate if you're an amazing writer it doesn't mean that you're a poor one either.</p>
<p>I think it's wrong that some cop out by saying that the test is that severely flawed and it undermines the actual 12-quality work. It's like saying... well, the test is flawed and you wrote a lot in a short amount of time, this explains it--you're a crap writer but got saved through quantity.</p>
<p>face it...i wrote a damn good essay (just short of one page) and got a 7! freekin BS and the longer the better.</p>
<p>I filled the full 2 pages and got a 10.</p>
<p>I wrote just over a page with 4 paragraphs and got a 10</p>
<p>I'm sort of a little confused about how I did so poorly on the writing MC (59/80). Maybe because it was a long test, I did get a 12 on my essay and I think it's because I was more energized at the beginning of the test. However, I only wrote 1.75 pages, 3 pargraphs, and 2 sentences that were basically my thesis for the conclusion. I don't think I'm ever going to go with 5 paragraph format ever again, it seems better to have two very compelling arguments that are long rather than trying to fit three arguments into the VERY limited time frame.</p>
<p>I have an idea. They should release our AP FRQ & DBQ scores. That would actually show some sort of writing ability....much better than the SAT at least.</p>
<p>Multiple-Choice: 77 (only missed one)
Essay: 6/12 (.9 page, four paragraphs, two examples)
Total: 700
The only thing on the collegeboard scoring rubric for a three that could apply to my essay would be that it had weak examples, but it didn’t have bad vocab, poor syntax, tons of errors in grammar, etc.-- all of which are characteristic of three.
Oh, and my friend missed one on the MC as well and got a 10 with a two page essay… and she got an 800.</p>
<p>I filled the full two pages and got a 10.</p>
<p>March: 1.5 pages, 8
May: 1.9 pages, 11</p>
<p>i filled both pages completely and scrunched the last few lines and received an 11.</p>
<p>correlation does not prove causation. from what ap psych and ap stats have taught me, there might be a confounding variable causing such a relationship. </p>
<p>in a possible example: taller people score higher on the SAT writing as well, so it’s to your advantage to be tall. and maybe if you’re tall enough, then you too can score a perfect. </p>
<p>well, that’s partially true, because there is a confounding variable there. have you ever considered that taller people are older? that older people have learned more in school? that learning more in school makes one more intelligent and thus more likely to score well on the SAT writing section? that it really isn’t the height that causes the scores to turn out like that? </p>
<p>so while it’s likely (we want to be optimistic) that short people (precocious young ones or learned midgets) can score really high, it’s more likely that tall people (older people) will score higher because of the whole intelligence thing being correlated to both. </p>
<p>in the end, maybe i have absolutely no idea what i’m talking about, but anyways, perhaps the people who write more tend to offer more support and more examples and more descriptive words and maybe even more material in showing a definite structure in their writing and that’s what really gives them the high score. i don’t know, but i think i’ll continue to write more on this SAT test as well, just in case it really is all about length… o.0</p>
<p>The graders are given very little time to grade each essay, so length is sometimes a cop out for them</p>