How to Conquer the Writing Section in the New SAT

(The following article is an accumulation of my knowledge of the writing section of the new SAT. The information was gained primarily through personal experience, along with collegeboard.com)

For many years the SAT was under the same basic format. Takers knew that the perfect score was a 1600, and such an achievement was held in high esteem by all universities around the United States of America. However, in 2005, all this changed. No longer was a 1600 considered a beautiful score. Instead, it was only one third of the total possible points on the revised exam. The two sections that comprised the SAT formerly both still held their total points of 800 possible per section, but another new section of 800 points was also now to be taken into consideration. This new section? The writing section.

Made up of both multiple choice questions and an essay writing portion, the writing section of the SAT also is worth a total of 800 points, thereby making the new perfect score a whopping 2400 points. This new writing section has a twenty-five minute essay to start off the whole test; test takers are given the twenty-five minutes to develop and write an essay on the prompt provided in the test booklet. The SAT will usually both start and end with a writing section; the first is the essay part, and the last section is a multiple choice one. The essay is worth about thirty percent of the tester's writing section score, while the various portions of multiple choice grammar parts make up the other seventy percent.