SAT essay grader for the School Day essay

Is there still an SAT essay?

Only on some school days. The College Board dropped the optional essay from the national test after the June 2021 administration (College Board, 2021), and the digital SAT on weekend dates has none. It survives in SAT School Day in states that require it: New Hampshire, for one, runs an SAT School Day with Essay each spring. The College Board's own advice is to ask your counselor whether your school-day test includes it.

The task has not changed in spirit. You get 50 minutes to read a published passage that argues a point and explain how the author builds the argument — through evidence, reasoning, and stylistic or persuasive elements. The response is scored on three dimensions, each from 1 to 4 (SAT School Day with Essay).

How the SAT essay grader scores

Each dimension is a four-level ladder. The dimensions and the scale are the College Board's; the wording of each level is ours, written from their published descriptions. The model places the response on each ladder, and the nearest level becomes the score.

Two responses to one passage

To test it, we wrote a 323-word passage in the style of an SAT source: a writer urges the city council to plant ten thousand street trees, opening with a sidewalk that read 91 degrees in the shade and 118 in the sun, conceding that trees are not free, and closing on the children who will walk under them. Then we wrote two responses and graded both on 26 September 2026.

The second response lost almost everything on Analysis: the model put it at 0.09 on a ladder that runs from 0 to 3, because it tells the reader that trees give us oxygen and that the author is right, instead of explaining how the author persuades. Its Reading score held up, since the summary is accurate, and so did Writing. That split is the pattern to watch for in your own drafts.

Where Analysis points go

Three habits cost the most on Analysis: summarizing the passage paragraph by paragraph, quoting without saying what the quotation does to the reader, and closing with your own view of the issue. The checks below catch the first and the last; the Analysis score itself catches the middle one.

The counted checks

Quotes, opinion and technique

With the passage pasted, every quotation in your response is checked against it word for word; the strong response had ten exact matches. The opinion check flags phrases such as “I agree” or “we should”, which signal an argument about the issue rather than about the writing. The technique check counts references to evidence, reasoning, concessions, anecdotes, statistics and tone. A length note appears below 250 words, short for 50 minutes.

Practicing with the grader

• Time the draft at 50 minutes, including reading; the grader scores what you would actually produce.
• Open with a thesis about how the author persuades, not about the issue.
• Give each body paragraph one technique: quote it, name it, then explain its effect on the audience.
• Grade, fix the lowest dimension, and grade again; each run is a new reading.

The follow-ups help between drafts. Ask “Does every body paragraph explain the effect of a technique?” and get a probability, or paste two versions of a sentence of analysis and see which one a scorer would rate higher — asked in both orders, because the model leans towards the second option on close calls.

What it is not

This is practice feedback, not an official score; the College Board's scorers work from their own training and sample papers. It will not tell you whether your state's school-day test has the essay. For essays with a teacher's rubric, the AI grader scores against any rubric you paste.

What a score costs

The first three runs work without an account, whether they are scores or follow-up questions. After that, a Google sign-in opens a monthly allowance of credits; top-up packs are a single payment and never run out. A 380-word response with the passage comes to roughly 1,400 input tokens: 2 credits.

Questions