<p>First off, I have to come clean. As many of you will notice, the example I used in my essay is complete fiction. However, the college board people say they don't care much about the veracity of SAT essays and I think it's pretty established that they pretty forgiving within this regard.</p>
<p>The essay itself filled about a page and a half. I only had two paragraphs, a thesis and one example paragraph (pretty bad, I know). I also only used one long-ish example (which I personally thought was good, even if it is made up).</p>
<p>Rate it on a scale of 12 and give your pointers and critiques. Thank you all in advance.</p>
<p>Here goes:</p>
<p>Prompt 1
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below. It is better to try to be original than to merely imitate others. People should always try to say, write, think, or create something new. There is little value in merely repeating what has been done before. People who merely copy or use the ideas and inventions of others, no matter how successful they may be, have never achieved anything significant.</p>
<p>Assignment:
Is it always better to be original than to imitate or use the ideas of others? 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.</p>
<hr>
<p>Here is the essay:</p>
<p>It is almost an axiomatic fact that original thought is the only way to innovation and success. In fact, most, if not all, modern scientific breakthroughs came about as a direct result of peoples courage to think outside the box.</p>
<p>One lucid example of this is the advent of the internet. In 1973, two men, a junior CIA analyst and and a Stanford Computer Science Ph.D student, wrote a report outlining the US military's shortcomings in it ability to transfer large amounts of information in small amounts of time. The report said that these shortcomings debilitated the US armed forces' decision-making cycle. It warned that, in the event of a war with the USSR, this could very well lead to an across-the-board failure of the US armed forces to mobilize to confront the threat. The report recommended that the Pentagon begin investing in a "networked" computer system that would allow for large volumes of information to be passed along different branches of the US armed forces in short amounts of time. The idea was met with a storm of criticism from the US military was, which at the time, known for its relative conservatism when it came to battlefield decision-making. Although the project had received funding, it had only received a small amount. It was not until several breakthroughs did the project receive significant support. Had the two analysts stuck to conventional thought, the internet would have never came about.</p>