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It seems like everybody has a different opinion about how to do well on the SAT essay. Some people say you should write a strict five-paragraph essay, with an introduction, a conclusion, and three specific examples. Some people say you should read well-known books like The Great Gatsby or The Scarlet Letter and refer to them as often as you can. Some people say that the real key is to write as much as humanly possible. Some say you should do all of these at once!

We want students to know that there are no short cuts to success on the SAT essay. The high school and college teachers who will score your essay have seen it all before. These teachers are not going to give high scores to an essay just because it is long, or has five paragraphs, or uses literary examples. The scorers are experts at identifying truly good writing--essays that insightfully develop a point of view with appropriate reasons and examples and use language skillfully.

So what can you do to write a successful SAT essay? Here are some strategies the College Board would like you to consider:

Read the entire assignment. It's all there to help you. Every essay assignment contains a short paragraph about the issue, usually from a specific author or book. Don't ignore this important information in your rush to answer the question. Imagine that you are talking to the author of the paragraph about the issue. What would you say to him or her? Would you argue or agree? What other ideas or examples would you bring up? Answering these questions will help you develop your own point of view.

I have worked scoring essays ETS. Get real. The above essay gets a high score because you should see the rest of them.

I too grade for the ETS in HIstory AP courses. My experience is that the essay portions of these AP exams reward students for jumping though hoops, but not for good writing or critical thinking. The students who do well memorize rubrics. The students who do poorly never had a teacher who gave them the rubric. The best essays rarely received the highest scores.

I *hope* others’ experience has been different.

I’m a high school English teacher. I teach six periods of English a day. I have 150 students. From about the age of 4 until my final year in college, I read 3-7 books per week, sometimes more. I’ve been teaching for six years, and I’m ashamed to say that if I thought hard about it, I could probably make a list of all of the books I’ve read this school year. I don’t have time to read, and frankly, I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm for reading.

That’s something that I, a lifelong bookworm, never thought I’d say, but it’s true. I don’t enjoy reading and I don’t enjoy writing—it’s somehow been totally wrung out of me. I’m currently looking for a way out of teaching English, because I want my old enjoyments back. I’m tired of the pressure of trying to reform years of bad writing habits, facing pressure to get my students to perform well on the state tests, exit exam, SAT, AP, and be prepared for college-level writing. I’m tired of people looking at us and questioning why we are failing as English teachers, when students come to me in the 9th grade as college-prep students and still have trouble with basic homonyms and sentence structure, and what’s worse, have no motivation to improve.

Two high schools in Minnesota are using Pearson Education's WriteToLearn to help students build literacy skills and prepare for the new Minnesota writing assessment.

The schools are Dunwoody Academy High School, a new technical charter school in north Minneapolis administered by Dunwoody College, and Robbinsdale Cooper High School, part of the Robbinsdale Area Schools in New Hope, Minn.

With WriteToLearn, students practice essay writing and summarization skills, and their efforts are measured by a "Knowledge Analysis Technologies" (KAT) engine. The KAT engine is an automated assessment technology that evaluates the meaning of text by examining whole passages, not just grammatical correctness or spelling.

"WriteToLearn is an awesome program that gives each student feedback right away, which is something a teacher cannot possibly have time to do," said Duane Dutrieuille, dean of academic and student affairs at Dunwoody Academy High School.