How the SAT Essay is Scored

Though excellent writing will receive top scores on any scale, it is useful to know exactly how the College Board will evaluate the SAT essay—what its readers will be looking for, how they will approach each paper, and how each score level is defined.

Scoring Criteria and the Six-Point Scale

The College Board's essay readers will grade each essay holistically, which means that they will read the paper to get an overall impression of its effectiveness and use that impression as the basis of the score. In other words, a minor spelling error here or there should not detract significantly from the score of an otherwise powerful essay. The readers will understand that the essays were written very quickly. Still, larger-scale problems, such as poor organization, weak supporting evidence, or a spelling problem so widespread that it affects the essay's clarity, will certainly lead to a lower score.

Readers will assign each essay a score on a six-point scale, six being the highest and zero being the lowest possible score, reserved for essays that do not address the given topic at all. Again, the essay will not need to be perfect to earn a six; perfect essays generally do not appear in 25 minutes. Top-level essays will, however, need to stand out from the pack through logical organization, mature diction, appropriate variety, and perhaps most importantly, insightful and original ideas. You can read the College Board's scoring guide, which outlines the characteristics of each score level, by clicking here.

Examples

The College Board uses representative examples of each score level—or "anchor papers"—to train its essay readers. Fortunately, some of these anchor papers are available for review and study by clicking here and scrolling to the bottom of the page. We encourage you to read each of these samples along with the reader's annotation. This will give you an excellent idea of the standards that will apply to the scoring of your essay.