I had ~2000 students use my template on the old SAT and the average essay score was 11.2.These are international students, studying in Asia (I’m in Asia), plenty of whom had fluency issues of varying severity and vanishingly few of whom could really write a great 2-page essay on their own in 25 minutes.
Nobody wants to believe templates work, but they do, and it’s trivially easy to train kids to use them.
You don’t have to believe me, of course, and I have nothing to gain from convincing you, but if you’d like to exchange PMs, I can share more about the nuts and bolts of how it works 
I didn’t say that. I think it’s just as coachable, but it’s not quite as fool-proof or brainless as the old one. The new one requires a more flexible template and more student decision-making. Not a lot, but more 