SAT essay section: Problems with grading, instruction, and prompts (2013)

I was a student at an SAT prep center during high school and worked there for a year during college. The strategy we recommended for essays was to build a chart with one book, one quote, one historical event, etc. The best choices were broadly applicable across different essay topics.

Students would then write multiple practice essays referencing the same sources over and over. In 25 minutes, there's no time to come up with something original. It's better to have a go-to set of sources that you can mold to fit the essay topic at hand.

I remember when I took the SATs I did quite well on the reading and math, but not so hot on the writing. I remember feeling that the grading of the essay wasn't made clear at all- Should I throw out unnecessary college-level vocabulary to sound smart or write to a casual reader? Should I make appeals to emotion or cite studies?

I remember one prompt I got was "All leaders deserve their positions of leadership," and I thought, "Well they used the word ALL so really the most logical refutation would be merely a counter-example (e.g. Hitler) but now I have to drag out this reasoning into this unnatural 5-paragraph contrivance."

Reminds me of http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/04/30/2227243/grading-soft...