Wondering how to use Guided Drafts to help students prepare for the ACT and SAT Essays? For both of these tests, try starting students off with untimed preparation, then gradually prepare them for more test-like conditions with timed practice. For either approach, you can assign an official ACT or SAT prompt!
💡 Tip: For the ACT, assign an official prompt right from our assignment library! For the SAT, assign one of our original prompts from the assignment library, or find the official practice prompts in our Help Center. (Just copy and paste the link for the official SAT prompt directly into the “Prompt” section when creating your assignment, and students will be able to open it directly from their Guided Drafts!)
To assign an ACT Guided Draft, click here!
To assign an SAT Guided Draft, click here!
- Note: The SAT Essay is a type of a rhetorical analysis essay. The SAT Guided Draft is geared specifically toward preparing students to write an analysis of a contemporary, persuasive passage within a 50-minute time limit. If you’re looking for more robust support in analysis skills on passages with various purposes, check out the Rhetorical Analysis Guided Draft.
Untimed Preparation
Start your ACT or SAT Essay preparation by first assigning an untimed Guided Draft. Allowing additional time for initial practice will help your students become familiar with the task and internalize the Guided Draft’s tips and strategies for successfully writing the essay under time pressure.
Here are some suggestions for how to use the Guided Draft to help students understand the ACT or SAT Essay task and rubric, and learn specific strategies for test day.
Before students start to write:
1. Try walking through key pieces of the Guided Draft together as a class. Project this content onto the board while previewing the assignment:
- Click through the introductory tutorial to get an overview of the essay. (Here's the tutorial for ACT; here's the tutorial for SAT.)
- Preview the rubric item lessons to help students understand what they will be graded on.
2. Take advantage of our pre-writing materials.
Use our ACT pre-writing materials to pre-teach strategies for planning on test day. For example:
- Our Analyzing the Prompt and Coming Up With a Thesis sheet helps students understand the prompt's issue and perspectives and decide on a nuanced thesis.
- Our Outlining sheet gives students practice with a quick planning approach that they can easily replicate during the test.
Use our SAT pre-writing materials to pre-teach rhetorical analysis skills and strategies for test day. For example:
- Our Persuasive Strategies sheet helps students identify types of strategies the SAT prompt asks for (evidence, reasoning, and stylistic or persuasive elements).
- Our Outlining sheet gives students practice with a quick planning approach that they can easily replicate during the test.
- For more in-depth pre-writing support, check out our Rhetorical Analysis pre-writing materials, too!
3. Encourage students to take advantage of the support the Guided Drafts offer—the tutorials, tips and lessons. This curriculum will help them meet the rubric criteria, manage their time, and organize their essays on test day.
Timed Practice
Once students are familiar with the task and test-taking strategies, give them repeated opportunities to practice writing timed essays.
Gradually decrease the time you give students for the assignment until eventually allotting just the amount of time they’ll have on test day (40 minutes for the ACT, 50 minutes for the SAT). Here are some suggestions for how to set up a more authentic timed essay practice.
- Use a different prompt each time you assign timed practice. This will give students repeated exposure to the prompt language they’ll see on the test.
- Before students begin the assignment, remind them of the time management strategies recommended in the Guided Draft, and encourage them to create their own outlines using the strategies laid out in our pre-writing outlining sheets.
- To simulate writing the actual essay, challenge students to use less of the Guided Drafts support (tutorials, tips, and lessons) as they write. If you feel your students are ready to write without any support, try using a Quick Write assignment instead.
Looking for more ACT and SAT test prep support?
- This SAT Essay Unit Plan combines both the untimed and timed essay prep approaches into a 3-4 day unit. Read on here for specific suggestions for each approach!
- Check out these additional Help Center articles: