<p>Some of my friends said that schools read your SAT essay to make sure that your writing styles on your SAT essay and your college essay are similar. This makes me concerned since (naturally) my SAT essay is going to pale in comparison to my college essay and I dont want schools to think im having someone else write my essays for me. Do colleges really do this or do they check the score to just make sure that youre a capable writer (which is what i originally thought).</p>
<p>Some colleges do check, knowing that your SAT essay will and should be far worse than your college essay.</p>
<p>USC did that.</p>
<p>Your SAT essay, while being much rougher than your college essays, will have similar tone, style, and diction.</p>
<p>If your SAT essay looks like it was written by a completely different person than your app essay (i.e. it looks like you ran it through a thesaurus or was written by somebody much more competent in writing than the author of your SAT essay), it may give them pause.</p>
<p>Somehow I don’t see any of the Ivies taking the time to read your SAT essay. maybe if you submitted one of the best essays of that application cycle but had a 500 writing with a 5 essay.</p>
<p>Frankly, this practice seems ridiculous. A writing professor at MIT said that she tutored students to specifically go against their own naturally good writing abilities to conform to the style the SAT essay asks for, and while they all earned double-digit scores, none of the essays they wrote resembled their own style. How can a college possibly compare a 25-minute essay on a shallow topic to an application essay that applicants frequently will spend months on? It’s not even comparing apples to oranges; it’s more like comparing apples to Karl Rove (I don’t even know how I came up with that; I just named a random person off the top of my head).</p>
<p>I doubt Yale does, because my sat essay was one of the most horrendous pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.</p>
<p>i didn’t even know colleges could see your SAT essay. wow now im embarrassed because my SAT essay was a complete load of poo.</p>
<p>that being said, the SAT writing section is a horrible measure of writing capability.</p>
<p>So colleges basically want you to write the puke you had to write on your SAT essay?</p>
<p>Yeah, I think not.</p>
<p>There is something called a writing style. it is reasonably easily discernible. Actually there are programs these days that can scan and compare writing. </p>
<p>its like when 3 people do a group project together, and split the work each doing one part, it is OBVIOUS to the teacher as to who wrote what. </p>
<p>for example, one of my friends uses a lot of semicolons ; in their writing while I prefer the comma. some write in more passive voice than others.</p>
<p>software can tell the difference. i mean MS word can check the passive voice % and thats a $100 program</p>