SAT ESSAY

Reading skill Building To demonstrate reading skill on the SAT Essay, you must go beyond merely restating what the author has said. Instead, you must paraphrase the author’ s argument, putting things in your own words. Let’ s examine some examples of good and bad paraphrasing of a couple of famous historical documents. Preamble to the U.S Constitution “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” GOOD PARAPHRASING: We should establish our constitution insuring justice, domestic peace, common defense, right to freedom to ourselves and our posterity. ANOTHER GOOD PARAPHRASING: “The U.S Constitution will provide the fundamental elements for a long-lasting, successful governmental structure....

SAT ESSAY EVALUATION The new SAT essay, debuting in March of 2016 as an optional section on the new SAT, looks radically different than the earlier version of the essay. Instead of coming up with your own argument, you will now be required to analyze someone else' s argument. This argument takes the form of a 650-750 word article, and you will be given a total of 50 minutes, instead of 25, to read and respond to it. In short, the SAT asks you to describe how the article in question persuades the reader of its point. In particular, you are asked to consider its use of evidence, reasoning and/or stylistic and persuasive elements. Scoring has also changed. Instead of receiving a cumulative score of 2-12, you will now receive three cumulative scores of 2-8 in three separate categories (Reading, Analysis, and writing) (with 2 being the lowest score and 8 the highest). Two separate graders will evaluate your essay and each of the two graders will evaluate your essay from 1 to 4...