'Sup fellas, wanna help a brother in arms? (by grading my essay)

Test Preparation
1

<p>Just wanted some thoughts, can you grade it? (normal SAT, 0 through 6)</p>

<p>Directions:</p>

<p>The novelist John Hersey wrote, "Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education."
ASSIGNMENT: What are your thoughts on the idea that failure is necessary for education to take place? Compose your essay in which you [...] blah blah blah usual stuff.</p>

<p>My essay:</p>

<p>____<strong><em>Failure is not a loss; it is merely the first-stepping stone towards success. Human beings are adaptive, which means they learn from mistakes, and that ability is very important because it has allowed us to advance this far. A prime example of someone—or something, rather—that has used past failures to succeed in future endeavors is Google Inc., who failed time after time to put out social services, but finally succeeded in 2011, with Google+.
_</em></strong><strong><em>In the early days of the Internet Google was king. Its algorithm for webpage searches was the best in the world, and it prided itself on being informational and mechanic. Then, in late 2006, came Facebook Inc., which threatened to dethrone Google as king of the Internet. Facebook was a social networking website and people were using it instead of Google to ask questions like “What movies should I watch?” So Google came up with its answer. Google Buzz. And it was a catastrophe. Google Buzz accidentally made everyone one of its users’ email contacts public, and media outrage soon followed. Google was sued, it had to agree to 20 years of monitoring by the FTC, and no one wanted to use Google Buzz.
</em></strong><strong><em>Months passed since the Google Buzz debacle, Facebook became more popular, and Google seemed to have given up. But soon, Google released Google Wave. Google Wave was a free service that combined chatting, email, video conferencing, and office suit into one place. Reviews of Google Wave were very positive, but there was one problem: it was too complicated. People were happy with simple Facebook chatting and simple Facebook games. Why would they want to use Google Wave? So, they didn’t. Like with Buzz, Wave eventually died, but this time not because of public outrage but because of public disinterest.
_</em></strong><strong><em>By this time Google was publicly mocked for not being able to beat Facebook despite repeated attempts. Then, a years later, something amazing happened: Google released yet another social networking service, but this time it was actually good. It was called Google Plus, and it took the best features of Google Buzz and Google Wave and threw away the bad parts. With Google Plus, users could control who they talked to, so nobody complained as did with Buzz. Google Plus also had video conferencing and chatting, along with a collaborative office suite, all from Google Wave, but made simpler for average people.
_</em></strong>_____Some say Google could have made a good social networking service early on if it had tried hard enough. I disagree. The mistakes Google made early on propelled it to not only make something better, but also not to make those mistakes again. Thanks to its failed efforts, it succeeded in the end.</p>

2

<p>0/6 - essay doesn’t answer the prompt.</p>

<p>boring intro. I can’t locate your thesis, and there’s nothing to indicate “learning from failures” or anything like that. Furthermore, this looks more like a wikipedia article than your own essay.</p>

<p>You didn’t link your example to your argument.</p>

<p>This is an essay, not a book report on google. Big turn-off. Only state the facts that will support your argument. Also, one example is generally not enough to prove your point.</p>

<p>Your conclusion paragraph cemented the impression that this is a google book report.</p>