Grade this SAT essay please?

I would give it a 4 or 5 out of 6. You got the most important part: you made a thesis about the prompt and you used two examples that directly supported it. Unfortunately your downfall was your writing style. The SAT readers want a very smooth flow. What it looks like you did was add complex SAT words. That is normally a good thing, but it looks like you just tried to squeeze them in when possible, and those words weren't actually part of your thought process while writing. It disturbed the flow of the essay and that is why I took off one point. The other thing is you sentence structure is a bit simple. Try to vary the length of your sentences and add some modifiers. It makes your essay sound more sophisticated and of a higher level. Still, the toughest thing for people is to directly relate ALL examples to the question at hand and their thesis, but yours accomplishes that. That is also the most important grading criteria. If you make the essay flow smoothly and your syntax is more sophisticated, you can easily pull off a 5 or 6. By the way, I am grading out of 6, not 12.