Post 30: SAT Practice Essay

This is an illegitimate question because as colleges become increasingly more competitive, it is necessary as a student to mold, assimilate, if you will to what society views as the best means to success. In fact, this essay in itself is a tribute to this fact, since all juniors are required to take the SAT as a common assessment to determine college admissions. However, it is because of this that students are slowly losing their own voice. To pose an analogy reiterating my stand, this issue is like baking a cake: sugar, or guidance, is needed and whipped cream, or the will of a specific student, is also needed, but with too much of either, the taste is too sweet.

In fact, many successes have come out of defying this world of assimilation. For example, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. Had he assimilated to what his intuition, his parents, his teachers, and the world told him; that a college education is necessary to have a good life, to succeed; we might have computers which take up an entire room even today, consequently being years behind the current technology we possess.

However, it would be naïve of me to think that dropping out of school would be the right path to take. Contrary to my belief that students must have their own voice and find things out for themselves, I also believe that if we all had no guidance, there would be an inevitable drop off in intelligence and the will to work hard in school. At my school, we are forced to take a certain amount of credits for each type of course. Had I not taken some courses, my GPA would be higher, as would my current self confidence, but without being forced to learn these subjects, I would not be as complete a person today, nor would I have developed interest in some fields I would’ve otherwise merely assumed to be boring.

I recently saw a commercial for a pill company, stating elements which defied certain substances. I saw the abbreviated element name as Hu, which does not exist. “Hu”? I thought to myself. What could that be? Evidently, Hu stood for “the human element.” The commercial proclaimed that nothing was more powerful than the human element. Through this essay, I have found myself; my human element: through learning new things coupled with your own voice, only then can there exist intelligence. I believe that with no guidance combined with no self initiative would yield no ambiguity among all of us. The question was not illegitimate, but rather, my thinking was. Only in a world where teachers and students both have their own say in matters can there be anybody truly learned.