Spare First 5 Minutes for Essay Portion of the SAT

By Kang Shin-who, Sa Eun-young, Staff Reporters

The first five minutes are the most critical for writing the SAT essay test for U.S. college admission, James Herron, 39, head lecturer in expository writing at Harvard University, said.

``Many students start to write immediately without planning because they have just 25 minutes for the essay test. It's very important to take the first five minutes to think about the thesis because it is crucial,'' Herron said in an interview with The Korea Times Friday.

Herron visited Seoul last week to take part in the U.S. college admission strategy seminar and workshop, ``2007 AHEd Edu Summit'' and gave lectures on how to write a good SAT essay to 90 hopefuls for top U.S. colleges.

In the workshop, he discussed samples of their writing efforts and said that many of the problems he encountered were identical to those of U.S. students. He explained as follows.

First, they present an unsupportable thesis that isn’t really a thesis at all. It's not arguable and not actually taking a position, which is a common mistake among U.S. students.

Second, students present evidence that they don't fully analyze; so they drop information into the essay but don't show how the information supports their argument.

Third, for some students, English as a second language is an issue. But students worry about that more than they need. Many students who have very good English ability still worry about little problems in their English that aren't important. Their writing is perfectly clear but they still worry _ it's a kind of insecurity.

The writing professor also advised that according to his research a longer essay usually yields better results, although the college board says the length of essay is not important.
``Dr. Les Pearlman at Massachusetts Institute Technology analyzed SAT essay answers and scores and found that there was 90 percent correlation between length of essays and the scores,'' he said.

In regard to essay evaluation, the professor said test graders are instructed to give scores only after reading entire essays rather like evaluating a painting. ``The tests are graded holistically, meaning that the scores are not broken down for each section, but the test as a whole is given a score. When you see a painting, you like it a lot, or not like it. You don't like some part of it, but it's the whole thing that you like,'' he said.

kswho@koreatimes.co.kr