The SAT Prep Black Book(128)
Many test-takers are surprised to learn that you don’t get extra consideration for using more academic examples, but it makes sense if you put yourself in the College Board’s shoes. The College Board is always nervous about being accused of elitism; if the SAT Essay rewarded historical and literary examples over personal ones, then people might complain that the scoring process was too heavily influenced by the quality of a test-taker’s education rather than by innate writing ability. So the College Board accepts non-academic examples in an effort to avoid this kind of criticism.
It’s also okay to make up facts, or to make mistakes in your presentation of historical or literary details if you decide to use academic examples. This isn’t like a history test in school, where the teacher would probably take points off for historical inaccuracies in addition to poor writing. On the SAT Essay, the accuracy of the facts simply doesn’t matter. (This is one of the things that Dr. Perelman was referring to when he complained that the test rewards the wrong things.) All that matters is that the examples you cite would support your thesis if they were true. Whether they actually are true is irrelevant.
Again, the reasoning behind this bizarre policy starts to make a little sense when we think about it from the College Board’s standpoint. Since they have to standardize the grading of the essay, if they were going to penalize you for writing something false, they would have to fact-check every single statement in every single essay, which would take a ton of time and money, particularly since writers can cite personal examples. So the only real solution for the College Board is to avoid doing any kind of fact-checking at all. Instead, the graders are simply looking to determine whether your examples would support the thesis if they were true.
This means that the SAT Essay allows you to make up any facts you want, as long as they would support the thesis if they were true.
SAT Essay Rule 4: Some Imperfect Grammar Is Okay
The high-scoring essays that appear in The Official SAT Study Guide have many mistakes that would qualify as errors for the Identifying Sentence Errors portion of the Writing Section. For example, the high-scoring essay on page 120 of the College Board’s book improperly shifts from the present tense to the past tense, uses the incorrect word alright, and incorrectly starts a sentence with the conjunction however. So you can get away with a few grammatical mistakes and still make a perfect score.
SAT Essay Rule 5: The Longer, The Better
All the high-scoring sample essays included in The Official SAT Study Guide are fairly long and well-developed, while the low-scoring sample essays are much shorter. But be careful—an essay’s score seems to correlate with its length, but that doesn’t mean that writing garbage just to fill up space is a good idea. What it means is that if you’ve written a short essay, your chances of scoring high seem to be just about zero.
For proof of this, check out the sample essay on page 210 of The Official SAT Study Guide. You’ll notice that it’s one of the better-written sample essays provided by the College Board, at least in terms of grammar, diction, and style, and that it does a better job of following the scoring guide on page 105 than the other sample essays do. You’ll also notice that it received a 3 out of 6 because it’s too short.
SAT Essay Rule 6: Vocabulary Isn’t That Important
On page 105 of the Blue Book, the College Board says it looks for a “varied, accurate, and apt vocabulary” in high-scoring essays. But the essays that receive the highest possible scores demonstrate very little in the way of vocabulary skills. The biggest word in the sample high-scoring essay on page 120 is dumbfounded, and, as already mentioned, that essay also uses the non-word alright. The other high-scoring essays have similarly unimpressive vocabularies.
I often see essays in which test-takers have tried to use big words they didn’t actually understand in an effort to impress the reader. But the reader truly doesn’t care about your vocabulary; the reader only cares how well you support your position and how long the essay is, as we see from the grades that real essays get. Be aware, though, that poorly used vocabulary words can hurt you if the reader notices them. The safest way to avoid any potential difficulties is simply to stick to words you actually know, since trying to use words you’re not certain of can’t help, and might hurt.
SAT Essay Rule 7: There’s No Set Format (But Use The 5-Paragraph One)
The high-scoring essays in The Official SAT Study Guide use a variety of formats. Some seem to use variations on the standard five-paragraph essay; all of them use an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph, both of varying lengths. So, in theory, just about any format seems acceptable.