Does the SAT Essay Affect Your Score? A Comprehensive Guide

The SAT is a crucial component of the college application process for many students. While the multiple-choice sections often take center stage, the optional SAT Essay can be a source of confusion and anxiety. This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the SAT Essay and its impact on your overall score and college admissions.

The Decoupling of the Essay Score

The most straightforward answer to the question of whether the SAT Essay affects your score is: no. The SAT Essay is scored separately and does not impact your overall SAT score of 400-1600. The essay section of the exam used to affect your Writing score, but weighing your essay performance into the writing section has been eliminated from the SAT exam’s scoring process. When you get your SAT essay scores back, you can expect to receive the three cumulative scores that result from combining the grades each reader gives your essay.

How the SAT Essay is Scored

With the 2016 overhaul of the SAT came an attempt to make the essay more academically defensible while also making it optional. A student opting to take the SAT Essay receives 2-8 scores in three dimensions: reading, analysis, and writing. No equating or fancy lookup table is involved. The scores are simply the sum of two readers’ 1-4 ratings in each dimension.

What is almost universally true about grading of standardized test essays is that readers gravitate to the middle of the scale. The default instinct is to nudge a score above or below a perceived cutoff or midpoint rather than to evenly distribute scores. When the only options are 1, 2, 3, or 4, the consequence is predictable-readers give out a lot of 2s and 3s and very few 1s and 4s. In fact, analysis shows that 80% of all reader scores are 2s or 3s. This, in turn, means that most of the dimension scores (the sum of the two readers) range from 4 to 6. Analysis scores are outliers. A third of readers give essays a 1 in Analysis.

The Diminishing Importance of the SAT Essay

In January 2021, the College Board announced that after June 2021, it would no longer offer the Essay portion of the SAT (except at schools who opt in during School Day Testing). While most colleges had already made SAT Essay scores optional, this move by the College Board means no colleges now require the SAT Essay.

Read also: UCF Application Strategies

Why Colleges Used to Value the SAT Essay

The SAT Essay is a lot like a typical college writing assignment that asks you to analyze a text. The SAT Essay asks you to use your reading, analysis, and writing skills. The SAT Essay shows how well you understand the passage and use it as the basis for a well-written, well-thought-out response. A successful essay shows that you understood the passage, including the interplay of central ideas and important details.

The SAT essay came under a great deal of criticism for being too loosely structured. With the 2016 overhaul of the SAT came an attempt to make the essay more academically defensible while also making it optional (as the ACT essay had long been).

The College Board's Stance on Essay Scores

SAT Essay scores for the new SAT are confusing to interpret, in part, because the College Board has intentionally given them little context. No percentiles or norms are provided in student reports. Even colleges do not receive any summary statistics. Given Compass’ concerns about the inaccuracy of essay scoring and the notable failures of the ACT on that front, the de-emphasis of norms would seem to be a good thing. The problem is that 10% of colleges are sticking with the SAT Essay as an admission requirement. While those colleges will not receive score distribution reports from the College Board, it is not difficult for them to construct their own statistics-officially or unofficially-based on thousands of applicants. Colleges can determine a “good score,” but students cannot. This asymmetry of information is harmful to students, as they are left to speculate how well they have performed and how their scores will be interpreted.

Navigating the Essay: To Take or Not to Take?

A common question regarding SAT scores is whether the whole mess can be avoided by skipping the essay. Despite serious misgivings about the test and the ways scores are interpreted, Compass still recommends that most students take the essay unless they are certain that they will not be applying to any of the colleges requiring or recommending it. Nationally, about 70% of students choose to take the essay on at least one SAT administration. When looking at higher scoring segments, that quickly rises to 85-90%. Most Compass students decide to do some preparation for the essay, because taking any part of a test “cold” can be an unpleasant experience, and students want to avoid feeling like a retake is necessary. In addition to practicing exercises and tests, most students can perform well enough on the SAT Essay after 1-2 hours of tutoring. Students taking a Compass practice SAT will also receive a scored essay.

Understanding Essay Scoring and Length

Ever since the essay was added to the SAT, current MIT research affiliate (and former director of the MIT undergraduate writing program) Les Perelman has been vocal about how the longer an essay is, the more likely it is to get a higher score. According to this 2005 New York Times article by Michael Winerip, Perelman analyzed the lengths and scores of 54 SAT-approved sample essays and found a nearly 90% correlation. The shortest essays (around 100 words) received the lowest possible score, 1 (or a combined score of 2 out of 12), while the longest essays (around 400 words), received the highest score, a 6 (or a combined score of 12 out of 12).

Just because longer essays tend to score better, however, doesn’t mean that you should just write the word “ideology” over and over again to fill up the page. The reason longer essays tend to score better is that students who write longer essays provide more support for their theses.

Many factors go into determining essay length, which makes it difficult to give a blanket length recommendation. These factors include: vocabulary, handwriting size, how fast you can write and think, and how much time you leave yourself to write (vs. how much time you take to plan). In general, assuming about 150 words per handwritten page, you need to write at least a page and a half (1.5 pages) to get a 3 or above on your essay (or a combined score of 6 or above).

How Colleges Use (or Don't Use) Essay Scores

Colleges have been given no guidance by College Board on how to use essay scores for admission. Will they sum the scores? Will they average them? Will they value certain areas over others? Chances are that if you are worrying too much about those questions, then you are likely losing sight of the bigger picture. We know of no cases where admission committees will make formulaic use of essay scores.

Colleges that do not require the SAT Essay fall into the “consider” and “do not consider” camps.

Retesting Strategies Based on Essay Scores

Are 3s and 4s, then, low enough that an otherwise high-scoring student should retest? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. In general, it is a mistake to retest solely to improve an essay score unless a student is confident that the SAT Total Score can be maintained or improved. A student with a 1340 PSAT and 1280 SAT may feel that it is worthwhile to bring up low essay scores because she has previously shown that she can do better on the Evidence-based Reading and Writing and Math, as well. A student with a 1400 PSAT and 1540 SAT should think long and hard before committing to a retest.

Key Takeaways

The SAT Essay score is separate from the overall SAT score.
The SAT Essay is optional, with very few colleges requiring it.
If a college requires the SAT Essay, they will likely require the ACT Writing section.
Even good writers run into the unpredictability involved and the fact that essay readers give so few high scores.

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