<p>Hi, I'm preparing for the SATs on my own and I would appreciate if anyone can give me some feedback on my essay and perhaps score so I know where I stand/what I need to correct.</p>
<p>Passage: Whenever Social Studies teacher Karen Greene sits down to grade a stack of papers, she wonders whether the grades convey useful information about student learning to the students themselves, to parents, counselors, or even to colleges.
While most would agree that grades provide a sort of feedback on student performance, finding consensus on the criteria to use for grading is a different story. Should Karen reward high grades to diligent, hard-working students with very low skills and limited achievement? Or should she risk discouraging such students by giving them the Ds that their work really deserves? What about grading students capable of doing excellent work when they put their mind to it but who rarely bother? An F for lack of effort might prod them to try harder, but would it accurately reflect the real quality of their work? (Adapted from Lisa Birk, Harvard Education Letter, October 2004)</p>
<p>Assignment: Should students who work very hard in a course earn very high grades, or should achievement rather than effort determine students' grades? 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 observations, experience, studies or reading.</p>
<p>Essay:
Living in a meritocrous society, achievement rather than effort is often used to determine a student's grades here and it has worked out fairly well so far. The benefit of rewarding achievement over effort is that it allows for nationwide standardised testing and provides the subjectivity a system of rewarding effort would be unable to.
However, so as not to discourage the weaker students, documents such as teacher reccomendations and parent-teacher dialogues supplement a student's grade profile to display his or her performance in school. Furthermore, schools recently have taken note of this seeming injustice and have made deliberate efforts to introduce programmes into their curriculum that would allow the less academically inclined students to translate their efforts and hard work into tangible results.
I feel that as a general rule, a system of rewarding achievement should be used to determine a students grades. However, schools should continue to cater programmes for the less academically inclined students to gain the recognition they deserve for their efforts.</p>
<p>Please be as brutal as possible, I hope to learn as much as I can from the mistakes I have made. Thank you! :)</p>
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