In an attempt to make the SAT fairer, and to help curb the
growing trend toward making the SAT optional for the admissions
process at certain colleges, the College Board has introduced
the “new” SAT for full-scale use starting with the
class of 2006. According to the College Board, this new test
will be more accurate in predicting students’ college
performance because it includes a third section testing students’
writing skills, and makes several adjustments to the existing
verbal and math sections.
This article focuses on the newest and most interesting section
of the test: the Writing portion. With strong origins in the
SAT II: Writing test of ages past, the new SAT I Writing section
will conduct a more thorough evaluation of each student’s
writing skills by asking students to identify sentence errors,
improve sentences and paragraphs, and to write a short essay.
For many test takers, the least appealing aspect of this new
section will be the essay. That’s because it’s an
unprecedented challenge that can’t be defeated with clever
guesswork or answer elimination. It’s just what The College
Board intended to do: solidify the test’s assessment of
actual writing skills. For those of you reading this article,
however, the essay section will prove to be a blessing in disguise.
Just be sure you’re ready to receive it.
We’ve always stressed SAT preparedness. When you consider
the verbal portion of the test in particular, the more vocabulary
words you know and the more practice tests you’ve completed,
the more likely you are to perform well when it’s crunch
time. Unfortunately, this strategy often leaves students disgruntled
when they leave the test, because they realize that they’ve
only used a very small portion of what they learned. If the
vocabulary words you memorized didn’t appear on the test,
the College Board is simply unaware that you know them at all.
Indeed, if you memorized a hundred of them, you might be lucky
if two or three appear.
We’ve reached the good news: For the first time in history,
the SAT gives the student a blank page on which to demonstrate
the strength of their vocabulary and the extent of their preparedness.
That’s right— the essay isn’t a burden. It’s
an opportunity to use that big, fat vocabulary word that didn’t
appear on the test. It’s your opportunity to correctly
use a semi-colon just because you can. Most importantly, it’s
your chance to show that you know how to write at the college
level—even if you really don’t.
Just like every other section of the SAT, the new writing portion
can be prepared for. More conveniently, however, preparing for
the essay section overlaps with preparing for every other verbal
and writing subsection on the test. When you’re brushing
up on sentence correction, you’re better preparing yourself
to form correct sentences when it comes time to write them.
When you memorize vocabulary words and their proper usage, you’re
teaching yourself the words you’ll want to use as soon
as you get the opportunity on the essay.
The essay will ask you to form a “point-of-view.”
If you’re college-bound, you’ve probably been writing
POV essays like these throughout your entire high school career.
Go back and look at everything you’ve written that you’d
consider to be high-quality and study it. You can pull ideas,
structures, and techniques from these essays if you want to.
Know your writing and try to identify the types of essays in
which it works best.
When the test comes, you’ll be asked to put together
an on-the-spot essay, but that doesn’t mean it has to
be of a structure or concept that is made up on-the-spot as
well. Practice writing point-of-view essays in a short amount
of time, then give them to a teacher whose opinion you respect
and ask for a critique. After all, most of the ETS graders that
score your real essay will be teachers or professors.
Also, remember to express the “point of view” that
is the easiest for you and that you feel will best allow you
to use your “bank” of skills and avoid those areas
you feel weaker using. You don’t have to agree with what
you write, although the point you agree with will usually be
the easier of the two to write about. However, on occasion,
you may feel that the opposite POV might be something a bit
more compelling to write about. When it does, convince yourself
to play the devil’s advocate and go for it! They don’t
care what you think—they only care about how well you
write.
You have no excuse for making grammatical, spelling or punctuation
mistakes. Why? It’s simple: If you’re not sure that
something is right, you have the option of not using it. The
people grading the essay are never going to know what you might
have put there instead of what you did. For once on this long,
controlled test, you will be in complete control. Take advantage
and guide the essay in the direction you desire, using the skills
you know how to use best.
In the end, go in knowing a large bank of SAT vocabulary words,
a solid knowledge of writing structure, and an idea of how to
best approach a POV essay prompt. Then, work your magic! You
can’t lose.
