SAT Essay Prep – How To Do It
Many students ask me “Mr. Daut, how can I prepare for the SAT Essay?” Intuitively they know that it’s not just about writing many essays. Practice alone won’t do it.
So what does?
You first have to know what graders are looking for. If you want to hit a target you need to know it’s size, shape and the exact mark you want to hit. Otherwise you may be training to hit the wrong mark.
So what does one do then to prepare for the sat essay?
It’s simple really.
You have to learn how to write quality ideas very quickly.
Research at MIT shows that essays that are 400 words or longer get the highest possible score about 90% of the time. The correlations were even stronger for the shorter essays – meaning if you wrote a short essay you were very likely to get a very low score.
But what about facts? Do you mean to say that long essays with factual errors also got a high score?
Yes. Factual content had nothing to do with the essays. If you said that Napoleon won World War II for Germany you would get just as high a score as if you said the Allies won World War II.
This is sad but true.
So if you want to get a high score on the sat essay write a lot. Don’t worry about facts, in fact make up whatever facts will fit your thesis.
It’s really that easy belive it or not.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 5:10 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.