Hi everyone! To start off with, I recently received my SAT scores for my first sitting and was absolutely delighted to get a 1580. I ended up with a 800 in math, a 38 in reading, and a 40 in writing. However, I just got my essay score and I was absolutely HORRIFIED. It was a 6/3/6. I honestly have no idea what happened—it definitely wasn’t the best essay I’ve written, but I didn’t think it was that bad. I genuinely am a pretty good writer—I’ve won a writing competition and I have very high grades in my English classes. Will my essay scores hurt my chances of admission at t20 schools? I was really hoping that I wouldn’t have to take the SAT again. Do I need to retake it because of my terrible essay score? Thank you so much for responding!
First, it looks like only one score was bad. Second, I don’t know of any college that uses the essay score. I certainly see no reason to retake the SAT.
Harvard announced recently that they will no longer require the applicants to submit their essay scores. Perhaps other schools will follow as well???
In addition to Harvard, many many colleges have dumped the essay requirement in recent weeks including Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, Duke, and Caltech.
I don’t think so, especially since you have more real-world experience in writing essays like those competitions u talked about. I’m sure they realize that the SAT essay is nothing like the college essay