Everyone knows about the SAT. How could you not? It’s only the most important test of your entire life, second only to the ACT. However, when registering for the SAT, one question crops up, one you’ll probably ask yourself and potentially your parents: Should I take it with the essay?

Well, I’m here to say, no, don’t waste your time. Nine times out of 10, there is no reason to take this colossal waste of 55 minutes. Unless you plan on applying to a high tier Ivy League school like Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth, don’t bother.

First, the score of your essay doesn’t impact the score of your overall test, so even if you do amazingly well on the essay and not so well on the rest of the test, too bad for you, you still didn’t do so well on the rest of the test.

Second, most colleges do not require the essay at all. Now, granted, some of them recommend the essay, but let’s be honest. If you do well enough on the actual test, you shouldn’t need it. As I said earlier, only a handful of Ivy League schools actually require you to take it, so unless you plan on sending your scores to a school of that pedigree, there’s no real advantage to taking it.

Third and finally, the prompts for the essay are terrible. They’re every pretentious English prompt you’ve ever written, only now your potential future hangs in the balance of how well you respond to this one prompt.

Maybe I’d cut it a bit more slack if the prompt was about something relevant and meaningful, like the BLM movement or a stance on a major decision made by the president, but no, it’s the same cookie cutter, bland, meaningless, irrelevant topics you’ve been getting since freshman English.

I thought these tests were supposed to be reflective of the knowledge of the person taking it. I get that the essay is supposed to test a person’s ability to respond to a prompt with good grammar and relevant connections to the text. But couldn’t this also be a chance for students to write about a prominent and pressing social issue, exposing them to the real world in some manner?

Well, to the test’s credit, there isn’t a penalty to you if you do take the essay, if only to your wallet for the extra cost. Regardless, I found the writing portion of the SAT to be a long, boring waste of my time that has little to no importance to your college acceptance, unless you want to go to Yale, in which case, good luck. Do I regret taking it? Yes, absolutely.