<p>I've heard from many people (including one who used to be a college admissions officer) that the writing score on the SAT is largely ignored and/or not as important as the critical reading and critical math score. Is this true?</p>
<p>Many colleges still ignore the writing score. Most high ranks consider it but the math and critical reading sections are considered the more important. You also have to distinguish between the writing section and the essay. The essay score is even ignored by some of the high ranks, e.g., Stanford, Columbia, Cornell.</p>
<p>careermom- it very much depends upon the school. For instance, Penn State uses a students highest total score on all 3 sections. </p>
<p>At the admissions presentation for Temple U, they said they average the CR and W scores, so the W scores do count for Temple. </p>
<p>Check the admissions websites of the schools you are interested in, and/or call the admissions office to ask whether they consider the writing score. You can also look at the common data set.</p>
<p>The writing score is becoming more accepted. The essay score, however, seems to be generally considered unproven at best and useless at worst. Which makes sense since the writing prompt and expectations are more akin to 5th-grade writing than college writing.</p>
<p>RedSeven, my college aide professional told me many colleges don’t even look at the essay. I hope he’s right because my son didn’t do well on his. He’s an honor student in English and gets straight A’s, and he is a good writer if he is given a computer, time and spell-check, all of which you don’t get during the SATs. If they let kids use calculators for math, why not let them use computers with spell-check for the essay?</p>
<p>In general that is correct, but as always I would look at individual schools admission sites. The writing section hasn’t been around that long by comparison and many schools don’t look at it because it takes years to show a correlation between performance on test and performance in college…as the years go on, if there is a strong indication that writing scores predict performance, then more schools may start using all three sections.</p>
<p>In the mean time, I suspect it is still better for writing score to be somewhat consistent with other sections (not too much an outlier).</p>
<p>CareerMom- it may be worthwhile for your child to retake the SAT to see if the writing score can be improved. There are two components of the writing score: the multiple choice part and the essay part. The essay score factors in to the total writing score. </p>
<p>Did your child only do poorly on the essay portion, or also on the multiple choice portion, or do you know? In my opinion, the writing section is one where the score can be improved through prep/practice. Reviewing grammar, understanding the types of grammar questions that are used, and learning strategies to respond to the essay prompts. Studies have shown that writing longer essays generates a better score.</p>
<p>pamom, he did poorly only on the essay. He only wrote one paragraph. Even though he does so well on his papers for school, like I said, he doesn’t work fast enough to crank out a good one in twenty minutes. He did practice over the past few months and just retook the SAT last Saturday. He said he wrote 3 paragraphs this time.</p>
<p>Sounds like he did everything he should have. Hopefully he will improve the writing score and then will be all set!</p>