How Your Essay is Graded: Once your essay is sent in, two readers each give it a score from 1-6 in four categories: Ideas and Analysis, Development and Support, Organization, Language Use and Conventions. The scores for each category are summed up to get the category’s Domain Score.
| 1st Reader | 2nd Reader | Domain Score | |||
| 1-6 | 1-6 | 2-12 | |||
| Ideas and Analysis | _____________ | + | _____________ | = | _____________ |
| Development and Support | _____________ | + | _____________ | = | _____________ |
| Organization | _____________ | + | _____________ | = | _____________ |
| Language Use and Conventions | _____________ | + | _____________ | = | _____________ |
The four Domain Scores are then added up to get a value between 8 and 48. Finally, that value is divided by 4 to get your final writing score (2 to 12), the one colleges look at.
Failure is making a 100 mistakes on the test.
Nielson Phu is a teacher, author, and engineer. His foray into the test prep world began in high school, when he self-studied his way from an average SAT score to the top percentile. While in college, he taught his first SAT classes in Brookline, MA and Lexington, MA during summer breaks. Since then, he has helped thousands of students worldwide improve their own SAT and ACT scores with a comprehensive approach that goes far beyond the basic material found in typical test prep books. He has scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT and a 35 on the ACT.
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