oCheck your work with the answer choices. “Carelessness” costs more people more points than any other single thing does.
Note that we think about the question holistically before we actually start solving it.
Ignore the order of difficulty, which is based on people who don’t know what they’re doing. You can make careless mistakes on any question, and every question has a simple, direct solution.
See the example solutions in this Black Book for demonstrations of these ideas.
The SAT Essay
“You only fail if you stop writing.”
- Ray Bradbury
Overview and Important Reminders For The SAT Essay
The SAT Essay is supposed to evaluate your ability to produce what the College Board calls “good writing.” The College Board’s intention here is commendable, but the essay test it has come up with is an awful tool for measuring writing ability. In other words, while a good writer might score well on this writing exercise, it’s very possible to score well without being a good writer at all, and some hallmarks of good writing might actually hurt you. In fact, in a widely publicized New York Times article from 2005, Dr. Les Perelman, a director of undergraduate writing at MIT, described the writing skills necessary for a good SAT score as “exactly what we don’t want to teach our kids.”[1]
To score well on the SAT Essay, all you have to do is completely ignore the official scoring rubric on page 105 of the College Board’s The Official SAT Study Guide and just imitate (almost copy) the features of the high-scoring sample essays from the Study Guide. In the coming pages, you’ll see what really sets apart a high-scoring essay, and exactly how to construct one of your very own.
(While you should do your best to imitate high-scoring sample essays and copy their techniques, you should NEVER plagiarize ANYTHING, ever. I’m not suggesting that you recycle any passage from anyone else’s work as your own. For one thing, since SAT Essay topics aren’t repeated, it’s unlikely that an exact passage from a high-scoring sample essay will help you much; more importantly, though, passing off another person’s work as your own is one of the most intellectually reprehensible things anyone can do. So don’t do it.)
Unwritten Test Design Rules of the SAT Essay
Believe it or not, even essay tests have rules. You have to learn them if you want to do well. But be careful! The SAT Scoring Guide that appears on page 105 of the College Board Publication The Official SAT Study Guide isn’t very useful if you’re trying to figure out exactly what to do on the test.
It might sound strange to say this, but most of the College Board’s advice on how to write the SAT essay is very, very bad, in the sense that many people who make an effort to follow it still end up with lower scores on the SAT Essay than they would like. Instead of following the rules that the College Board states explicitly, we’ll do something much smarter—we’ll figure out the rules that are implicitly revealed in the high- and low-scoring sample responses provided by the College Board in The Official SAT Study Guide. Remember that these are the rules revealed by actual high- and low-scoring sample essays released by the College Board. As such, they may be very different from the stated rules that you’ll find on page 105, and elsewhere, in the College Board’s Blue Book, the Official SAT Study Guide. Here are the real rules:
SAT Essay Rule 1: Open-Ended Prompts
The prompts that appear on the SAT Essay are all open-ended and fairly vague about what they want you to write. This gives you a wide degree of latitude in deciding which side of an argument to defend, and in supporting your position, which can be a good thing if you don’t let it overwhelm you.
SAT Essay Rule 2: Talk About Whatever You Want
When you plan your answer, you don’t have to worry about being politically correct or trying not to offend your reader. As an example, take a look at page 197 of the College Board publication The Official SAT Study Guide. You’ll see a perfect-scoring essay that talks favorably about how the Confederate Army was “defending its way of life” during the Civil War when it fought to defend slavery.
Now, nobody is suggesting that you go out of your way to discuss something controversial or offensive. All I’m trying to point out is that there’s no need to be worried that you might say the wrong thing. As the essay on page 197 demonstrates, the graders are interested in how well you develop an argument that answers the question in the prompt—they don’t really care what the argument actually is.
SAT Essay Rule 3: Make Up Any Proof You Want
When you’re looking for examples to support your argument, the SAT allows you to draw from anything at all. Some high-scoring essay-writers choose to draw examples from history and literature, but some of them draw examples from their own lives. In fact, the high-scoring essay on page 200 of The Official SAT Study Guide uses two personal examples that are almost certainly made up.