Last Saturday, thousands of high school seniors from over one hundred and seventy countries sharpened up their No. 2 pencils put new batteries in their calculators, paid their registration fees and filed into schoolrooms to take their SAT exams. Twenty-five minutes of this time honored, 87-year-old three-hour-and-45–minute ritual is now dedicated to the exam’s writing section.
The essay section was added in 2005 and accounts for thirty percent of the writing section and one-ninth of the total test score. This may not sound like much but doing well on the essay may make the difference between being eligible for a college such as Stanford and settling for a second tier school.
It is no wonder then that students search for tips on doing better on the section and MIT’s former director of Writing across the Curriculum program, Les Perelman, has one -- just make stuff up. Perelman consults at top universities on the subject of writing assessments and assisted in the development of MIT’s writing placement test. “It doesn’t matter if it is true or not,” Perelman says. “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.”
Taking the time to recall relevant life experiences can be a disadvantage. “The best advice is, don’t try to spend time remembering an event,” he suggests. “Just make one up. And I’ve heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn’t die.”
Students that understand what essay-readers care about (in correcting the exam) and what they do not care about will increase the odds of obtaining a high score. When scoring the essays, the reader needs to make a quota and there is no time to check facts. “There’s really no concern about factual accuracy,” says Anne Ruggles Gere, first-year writing professor at the University of Michigan.
“In fact, the makers of the SAT have indicated that in scoring, it really doesn’t matter if you say that the War of 1812 occurred in 1817. The complete lack of attention to any kind of accuracy of information conveys a very strange notion of what good writing might be,” she says. Many instructors suggest that you write like this for the exam but never again in your life -- unless you are going into politics.
About SliqEssays.co.uk
Sliq Essays (http://sliqessays.co.uk) has a large team of established UK writers. Many of them work in the academic world and essay writing is an essential part of their skills set. We will only release a piece of work to a client when it is of the highest standard, entirely free of plagiarism and extensively proofread.
Distributed by Iterate LLC
Company Name:SliqEssays.co.uk
Contact Person: Benjamin Wrights
Email:media@vytalnet.com
Phone: 4157669098
City: San Francisco
State: CA
Country: United States
Website: http://sliqessays.co.uk
0 comments:
Post a Comment