Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test:
In the 1930’s, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting “the only thing we need to fear is itself,” which desdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success. In the end, the American economy pulled out of the depression and succeeded communism.
If that looks a little dubious to you, well, that’s kind of the point. It’s a deliberately bad essay produced by a student coached by Les Perelman at MIT, to demonstrate the flaws in the test and its grading.
Of course, you could’ve gotten the same basic information from the Blogger SAT Challenge, only without this fascinating side trip into American unhistory…