Online Essay Viewing for Admissions Officers
Viewing student essays on the Web
Admissions officers are able to access individual student essays on the Web for viewing and downloading. For each official score report they receive, colleges have access to images of essays from every regular administration taken by the student to date. There are no fees associated with essay delivery.
To view essays, you will need to log on at SAT Essay View, using your institution's username and password (for questions about your log-on information, contact Code Control at (609) 771-7091). Once logged on, you can:
- View essays individually
- Arrange to download essays to your system in batches (explained below)
Colleges will only have access to the essays of those students from whom they received official score reports. Please encourage students to send official score reports to your institution.
Essay information
Colleges receive the following information, whether accessing essays individually or in batches:
- Student identifying information: Every essay image is accompanied by the student's name and address. A unique essay locator ID is included on the paper and electronic score reports sent to colleges.
- Essay prompt information: Every essay image from a regular test administration is accompanied by the essay prompt and assignment to which that student responded.
- Essay scores: Institutions can select whether to hide or to display scores with the image of the essay. View the Essay Scoring Guide.
Batch delivery of all essays
Your institution can choose to receive all student essays in batch files. An email address is required. To sign up:
- Indicate that you want to receive batch delivery of essays on your SAT Program Score Reporting Options Form (sent over the summer).
- Contact Code Control at (609) 771-7091.
Batch essay delivery also includes:
- The choice of receiving large batch essay files (up to 500 essays) or small batch essay files (up to 100 essays)
- A control file that gives a complete index file to let you determine which students' essays can be found in each PDF file. You can use this control file to upload essay images automatically into a database.
- Individual index in each PDF file that indicates each student's name and page number of her/his essay. View a sample index file (.txt/1K).
Accessing batch files
Batch essays are available for download in PDF format on the Web after each SAT administration. You access batch essay files in much the same way you access individual essays:
- Log on to SAT Essay View at www.collegeboard.com/essayview.
- Click the link to the batch essay files.
On the screen, you will see a list of your batches by test administration or by the week in which they were sent. Each contains the batch essay files from that SAT administration or from that week. You will receive an email when a batch of essays is available for download.
On-demand delivery of essays
Your institution can customize the batch of essays you access to only include the essays the college wants to see. The process has two steps:
- Creating and submitting a list of essays to download
- Logging back on later to download the essays
Customized essay batches are created each night and are usually available the following day.
Creating the essay list
You request batches of essays in much the same way you access individual essays:
- Log on to SAT Essay View at www.collegeboard.com/essayview
- Click the link to "Request a batch of essays"
- Provide your list of desired Essay Locator IDs (one by one, or copied and pasted from a text-only file)
Up to 3,000 essays can be requested in one batch. After submitting your request, you will receive a confirmation message with an essay batch number. You will also receive a confirmation email of the essay batch request sent to the email address on record for your institution. Save your batch number for accessing the file once it has become available.
Downloading essays
Log on again the next business day to download any batch files requested that have been successfully generated. The files will be individual PDF files in zipped format. Along with the batches of students' essays, you will receive
- A control file that gives a complete index file to let you determine which students' essays can be found in each PDF file. You can use this control file to upload essay images automatically into a database.
- Individual index in each PDF file that indicates each student's name and page number of her/his essay. View a sample index file (.txt/1K).