I’m not so sure, Marvin. As a former SAT essay reader, I never considered myself as much a fool as many tutors liked to tell their students I was. I credited myself with being able to discern whether or not a student had any idea what they were talking about. I’ve studied the ‘templates’ with interest and found them as substantive as telling the students to have an introduction, three examples (which usually turned out to be Hitler, Gatsby and one other from a movie they’d recently seen), and a conclusion. In other words, it was so superficial that it did nothing to teach a student to actually conceive and develop an idea, which was a requirement for any score above a three of six. Teaching the template may have been easy for the coach, but I never saw how it actually helped the student to write a better essay, unless the student was starting at such a low level that a three was an improved score.
I agree with you that the new essay is much more coachable, as I stated in my post.