<p>“3. Examples, Examples, Examples and more Examples. This is the fuel of your essay. You need to keep thinking of examples as you write. Personal anecdotes will not work (e.g. At my school, I volunteer every week…).”</p>
<p>I respectfully have to disagree with Entomom. Personal anecdotes DO work, at least they did in the case of my D. I just read over her essay from the Oct SAT, where she scored an 11 on the essay and 800 overall. ALL of her examples were personal anecdotes from a particular experience in her life, and there were zero examples from literature or history. </p>
<p>If I had to make a guess as to what distinguished her essay, I would say that it told a compelling story. It had a viewpoint and it flowed. And, yes, it was lengthy.</p>
<p>I didn’t read the article - I know, fail - but I’m pretty sure length is usually correlated with a better score because length IS generally a product of having more to say. Not always, but generally. Furthermore, a writer that is more skilled will have more time to write more, because he/she is adept at writing quickly while still keeping style and flow in check.</p>
<p>No doubt some kids will hog the page and it’ll all be fluff and written with no more skill than a 4th grader. But I find these people to be the odd ones out. Usually if one is bad at coming up with ideas or bad at writing, the process of writing is painful and he/she wants to keep it as short as possible. Certainly there are those that delude themselves or those that are told that “longer is better,” so they force themselves. But it just hasn’t been my academic experience or the experience of my peers (as I’ve witnessed it). Rather, I think we’ve all been hammered with the “quality is better than quantity” maxim. </p>
<p>I don’t always write long essays when I know what I’m talking about. But I do almost always write short essays when I don’t know what I’m talking about :p.</p>
<p>I agree why have it? the colleges dont pay attention. My D got an 800 on both CR and the writing portion. She is talented at both, her thing, no gimmics. but it really didnt matter on the writing portion. Kids need to spend their time on other things.</p>
<p>I found College Board’s response comical. They stated (paraphrasing) that out of all of the parts of the SAT this was the one part that correlates to the best chance of success in college.</p>
<p>WOAH…so now you are saying toss the other 2 parts because they mean squat, but this one that is totally subjective is the one that illustrates the best success? IS there now a national criteria of grading essays for profs that nobody knows of?</p>
<p>Sorry, but Collegeboard has known for yrs that this section of the SAT was never accepted, and they refuse to say we were wrong. Kind of reminds me of Coke back in the 80’s with New Coke…they kept telling everyone to buy it, but eventually they had to admit defeat.</p>
<p>Collegeboard needs to admit defeat. Nobody is buying the essay portion, not colleges, not parents and not students. Give it up, go back to the 1600 score.</p>
<p>The issue I have about the whole SAT I now is it is too long. My kid got to the test center at 7:45, and at 1 pm she is still there. Are they testing for endurance or what.</p>
<p>This makes sense to me. I have a senior and soph in college (non-science/math majors), and they each have had only one class (Psych 1) that used an objective, multiple-choice test. All other courses were graded on essay/short answer tests and papers.</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the reason they changed the format in the first place was outside political pressure–that is, it wasn’t Collegeboard’s decision. The president of the UC system apparently had a bone to pick with the analogy section, b/c either he or his daughter (don’t remember) had done terribly on it. He also wanted a mandatory writing section, so he told Collegeboard that unless they changed the SAT how he wanted it, UCs would no longer accept/take the SATs. Of course collegeboard, greedy for $$ from all the kids taking SATs only for UCs, was forced to change the format accordingly.</p>
<p>I don’t remember where I heard that but it sounds likely, no?</p>
<p>@oldfort: I think it all depends where you take the test. I took it at a crappy public school and didn’t get out till 2!!! That was really ridiculous. It’s not necessarily the length of the test as much as inefficiency in terms of getting the test started–getting kids into the right rooms, reading the directions, etc.</p>
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<p>I agree completely with starbright. Some people are very terse; some are not. This has little to do with how capable or good a writer you are or are not. Think Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. Also, even if “more capable students have more to say,” this is a 25 minute essay. It’s not a matter of less capable students running out of things to say, it’s a matter of EVERYONE running out of time. Only if you know that you need to start writing right away, and that quantity counts more than organization/quality, can you fill up the full two pages in those 25 min.</p>
<p>Correlation does not always equal causation, but in this case I think it does–longer essay–>better score.</p>
<p>Now, this is purely anecdotal and an incredibly small sample size–umm, just me–but I know that when I wrote 1.5 pages I got a worse score than when I wrote 2 pages (when I got a 12). Neither essay was appreciably different in terms of quality.</p>
<p>The other tips are good. Disregard everything you know about good writing: never use a small word where a big one will do. BS stuff.</p>
<p>Although graders are instructed to disregard the accuracy of facts, I don’t think it would reflect well if you put something blatantly wrong. I suggest instead writing about something very obscure, something for which there’s little to zero chance the grader has experience with it. For instance, on my 12 essay I wrote about a postmodernist short story we recently read in English class that I’m 99.9% sure neither essay grader would have experience with. I didn’t completely make stuff up about this story, but I was able to give very strong supporting evidence and specific details that were a little BS. I thought it worked quite well. : D</p>
<p>This threat is timely. Our family just got back from college visits in the Washington, DC area during the New Jersey teacher’s union convention break (the whole Capitol region was Jerseyated with teens and parents—it was comical). Anyway, at four of the five information sessions we attended (GT, GWU, American, UMCP), the presenters said that Admissions is not even using the essay portion of the SAT I “at this time” for review of applications. I wonder how many other colleges are ignoring it.</p>
<p>I have always wondered what academic skill the writing portion of the SAT is supposed to measure. There is a value to the ability to write quickly under pressure in a timed exam setting, but the Writing SAT doesn’t even measure that, because the student has no idea what the prompt will be. In a class, one would at least have some vague idea of what one would be asked to write about, and one could prepare. A task that asks students to write about an unknown topic in twenty minutes without any context, research or reflection cannot possibly show much about a student’s ability to construct an argument.</p>
<p>Both of them have written NOVELS, so I would say that’s a bad example :p</p>
<p>If you’re only able to eek out a paragraph in response to a super open-ended, philosophical question, I would have to say that means you have very little to say or that you write or think exceptionally slow, not that you write “tersely.” </p>
<p>There comes a certain point where a certain length is necessary to convey richness and complexity of ideas that are well-supported with evidence. If you turn in a one-page academic paper to a professor, even if it’s written beautifully, don’t you think the chances are you’re going to be told it wasn’t detailed enough, either in terms of complexity of thought or support? 25 minutes doesn’t give anyone much opportunity to do this, true. But all that means is a “short” essay by SAT Writing standards is therefore REALLY, excruciatingly short. We’re not talking 100 versus 200 pages or even 10 versus 12 pages. An inability to write a “long” SAT essay does indicate some inability to write quickly and have something to write about…because a long SAT essay, is, in the grand scheme of literature, actually not long at all…lol.</p>
<p>Conversely, if one can write quickly on an open-ended philosophical question, one might be superficial and glib rather than thoughtful and profound. Jane Austen wrote something to the effect that rapidity of thought is always much prized by its possessor, regardless of the quality of the performance. </p>
<p>I wonder whether the only value of the Writing section is to corroborate that the applicant can write in Standard English with a certain degree of proficiency and has not therefore plagiarized his/her application essays.</p>
<p>An SAT essay can be long but crappy, but it cannot be short and good because then you have not adequately discussed the issue or supported the issue to the level that would be expected of -a high schooler on a college prep course-. You make a good point about rapidity of thought but for the purpose of the SAT you’re not going to be saying anything super profound in 25 minutes anyway (and if this is what you think the SAT is about you are not very smart!) - you have to tailor your writing and thought process to what is being measured and expected. So, you best say something THOROUGH and well-supported and grammatically correct and flowing, which is perfectly possible given the constraints but not possible if you are unable to write quickly and clearly at all (an important skill if not a paramount skill) or are not able to process even the superficial amount of information that’s being asked of you quickly enough.</p>
<p>If an employer gave you a grant proposal to write and you spent weeks trying to say something PROFOUND but you haven’t thought about what the person giving the money wants to hear, you’ve just blew your deadline and lost everything. No, you’re never going to find out EXACTLY what that person who is reading your essays wants. But rapidly figuring out what you need to do to succeed based on the info available and then being able to do it (in a way that suscribes to certain standards of grammar/form) is indeed a measure of writing intelligence that would be particularly crucial for a college student or professional.</p>
<p>Yes, but the way the SAT Writing task is set up is a particularly poor way to gauge this ability because there is no “info available” on which to base the response. The prompt is content-free and success, in this context, is dependent on the ability to generate grammatically correct BS. I suppose if colleges value the ability to produce BS at the drop of a hat (and there is depressing evidence that some do), then the SAT I Writing task would be of use to them. However, as it seems that many colleges, including very selective ones, just ignore the SAT writing section, it’s not working as advertised.</p>
<p>" success, in this context, is dependent on the ability to generate grammatically correct BS."</p>
<p>No, it’s in the ability to construct an argument with supporting points and with some level of detail, organization/flow, and grammatical correctness. Though the fact that it has to appeal to a broad audience and the fact that it must be completed in a short period of time hinders the ability of the essay readers to assess a student’s research ability, they don’t claim that is part of the rubric anyway. While there seems to be some anectdotal evidence that the essays can contain “factual” BS, ability to arrange even “fake” facts in a persuasive and clear and well-written way does indicate several important skills even if they are independent of research skills or sheer knowledge or “profoundness”. Looking at my peers’ scores the best writers usually got the best scores. There was no super good writer at my school that was like oh gosh darn I got a bad score on the SAT Writing. Heck no.</p>
<p>My SAT writing score did randomly oscillate much more than my other scores so I feel there is some imperfection in it still. Clearly some students will be more “inspired” by certain prompts than others. That’s what dragged me down for sure on one test. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not weird and does not prove the writing test’s invalidity that length correlates with higher scores in this instance.</p>
<p>Certainly “getting away” with BSing means you have to have certain skills - an ability to reason, make a logical sounding argument, write gracefully, etc. etc. But the fact that the SAT Writing measures an ability to reason, make a logical argument, and write gracefully does not mean “BS” is the only thing that is important to grading in the SAT. We’re calling all rectangles squares here. Or something.</p>
<p>I don’t know how many times I have to say it…ability to reason, make a logical argument, write gracefully, write in an organized fashion. Those are pretty universal standards for good writing. </p>
<p>To that end, the SAT Writing is a useful measure of how articulate someone is with the written word. There are many things it doesn’t measure, but there sure as Hell are two other sections + high school grades + recs + essays + a whole boatload of other factors that when combined, paint a very realistic picture of the applicant.</p>
<p>I don’t really get why the SAT Writing gets such flack. I think it is a combination of the fact that some students can’t write and parents don’t want to accept that, and admissions boards at colleges think only they are God-like enough to judge an applicant’s essay-writing ability! Ahah. Or maybe it’s just that people have always been afraid of evaluating people based on things that have no right or wrong answer or aren’t strictly quantitative. The whole, not quantitative=no value. I think there’s too much going on here to surmise. But anyway.</p>
<p>But the SAT essay doesn’t really test that. You don’t need to be able to reason when you’re drawing up your own support, and when there’s a such a big reward for trying to use “big words,” graceful writing clearly isn’t a priority either. And with the emphasis on length (or amount of content, if you want to insist that wordiness isn’t rewarded), people that can write clearly are being docked for not filling up the given space. Now obviously an inability to write anything can come back to bite you in college or in a job, but when in those settings are you going to be given a hard 25-minute deadline to write about something you’ve never seen before? A matter of hours is very different from a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>So is the goal to test writing ability, or is it to test the ability to quickly come up with some argument? And if it’s the latter, do open-ended questions on pop-philosophical issues best serve that purpose?</p>
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<p>It’s a combination of factors: the shoddy grading, the lack of coherent purpose, and the completely artificial nature of the test.</p>