gre essay scorer

ScoreItNow! ™ Online Writing Practice Service for the GRE ® General Test

ScoreItNow! ™ Online Writing Practice is designed to help you practice for the Analytical Writing section of the GRE ® General Test administered beginning on September 22, 2023. Using ETS's e-rater ® technology, the automated scoring system provides immediate essay scoring in a confidential, risk-free environment.

This service lets you:

• Respond to GRE Analytical Writing topics created and tested by ETS test authors.
• Submit your responses online and get immediate scores on your responses from ETS's e-rater automated scoring system.
• Review scored sample essay responses on the topics you select.
• Review general suggestions for improving your writing skills.
• Receive diagnostic feedback on your responses.

The fee for the ScoreItNow! Online Writing Practice service is US$20, which entitles you to write essay responses on two GRE Analytical Writing topics and receive an e-rater score for each.

In addition, after you have submitted the two essay responses for scoring, you will have the option to write and submit essay responses on six FREE bonus Analytical Writing topics for more practice. You will receive a score on each essay response that you submit on these bonus topics.

NOTE: Although performance on ScoreItNow! essay topics is not an exact predictor of how you might perform on the GRE Analytical Writing measure during an actual GRE General Test administration, you are encouraged to write the ScoreItNow! essay responses under timed conditions to get a better sense of how you might perform on the actual test.

Using ScoreItNow! Online Writing Practice is easy

• Sign-up to use the service.
• Preview the GRE Analytical Writing task and topics.
• Review the GRE Analytical Writing scoring guides, sample topics and score level descriptions.
• Choose the Practice Option to compose your essay responses offline under untimed conditions, or the Test Experience Option to compose your responses online under timed conditions.
• Submit your essay responses for immediate scoring.

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Mastering GRE Essay Scoring: A Step-by-Step Guide

• June 8, 2023 December 18, 2023

As an international student contemplating taking the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) , you may be curious about how the essays on the test are scored. The GRE is a standardized exam that numerous graduate programs employ to gauge the preparedness of applicants for advanced academic studies. One of the exam’s sections is the Analytical Writing section, which includes two assignments: the Issue task and the Argument task. Two human graders score each task on a scale of 0 to 6, in half-point increments. The final score for each task is the average of the two grades. Additionally, this article will serve as a GRE prep guide, providing valuable information on how to approach the Analytical Writing section of the exam.

Overview of the GRE essay scoring guide

The GRE essay guide for the Analytical Writing section provides a rubric that the graders use to evaluate the essays. The rubric consists of four main categories:

1. Response to the task: This category assesses the extent to which the essay addresses the task and presents a clear position or thesis. Essays that fail to address the task or lack a clear thesis will score low in this category. 2. Development and support: This category assesses the extent to which the essay provides strong and relevant evidence to support its position. Essays that lack sufficient evidence or fail to connect the evidence to the thesis will score low in this category. 3. Organization: This category assesses the extent to which the essay is well-organized and easy to follow. Essays that lack clear transitions between paragraphs or fail to present a coherent argument will score low in this category. 4. Language use and conventions: This category assesses the extent to which the essay demonstrates a command of standard written English and appropriate use of grammar and syntax. Essays that contain frequent errors in grammar, punctuation, or syntax will score low in this category.

The two graders each assign a score to the essay in each of these categories, and the final score for each essay is the average of the two scores. The overall score for the Analytical Writing section is the average of the scores for the two essays.

GRE score guide for the essay

The GRE essay is scored on a 6-point holistic scale. Here’s what each score range means: Score: 6 A score of 6 represents a well-crafted, well-articulated essay that demonstrates mastery of the elements of effective writing. Papers in this category:

• Clearly identify important points and analyze them insightfully.
• Develop ideas cogently, organize them logically, and connect them with clear transitions.
• Effectively support main points.
• Demonstrate control of language, including diction and syntactic variety.
• Demonstrate knowledge of the conventions of standard written English, but may have minor flaws.

Score: 5 or 5.5

A score of 5 or 5.5 represents a well-developed essay that demonstrates good control of the elements of effective writing. Papers in this category:

• Clearly identify important features of the issue and analyze them in a generally thoughtful way.
• Develop ideas clearly, organize them logically, and connect them with appropriate transitions.
• Sensibly support the main points.
• Demonstrate facility with the conventions of standard written English, but may have occasional flaws.

Score: 4 or 4.5

A score of 4 or 4.5 represents a competent essay that demonstrates adequate control of the elements of writing. Papers in this category:

• Identify and analyze important features of the issue.
• Develop and organize ideas satisfactorily, but may not connect them with transitions supporting the main points.
• Demonstrate sufficient control of language to convey ideas with reasonable clarity.
• Generally follow the conventions of standard written English, but may have flaws.

Score: 3 or 3.5

A score of 3 or 3.5 demonstrates some competence in analyzing the issue at hand and in controlling the elements of writing, but is plainly flawed. Papers in this category exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

• Do not identify or analyze most of the important features of the issue, although some analysis of the issue is present.
• Mainly analyze tangential or irrelevant matters or reason poorly.
• Are limited in the logical development and organization of ideas.
• Offer support of little relevance and value for points of the issue; do not convey meaning clearly.
• Contain occasional major errors or frequent minor errors in grammar, usage, or mechanics.

Score: 2 or 2.5

A score of 2 or 2.5 demonstrates serious weaknesses in analytical writing skills. Papers in this category exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

• Do not present an issue based on logical analysis, but may instead present the writer’s own views on the subject.
• Do not develop ideas or are disorganized and illogical.
• Provide little, if any, relevant or reasonable support.
• Have serious and frequent problems in the use of language and in sentence structure.
• Contain numerous errors in grammar, usage, or mechanics that interfere with meaning.

Score: 1 or 1.5

A score of 1 or 1.5 demonstrates very serious weaknesses in analytical writing skills. Papers in this category exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

• Provide little evidence of the ability to understand and analyze the argument.
• Provide little evidence of the ability to develop an organized response.
• Have severe and persistent errors in language and sentence structure.
• Contain a pervasive pattern of errors in grammar, usage, or mechanics that results in incoherence.

Tips to prepare for the analytical writing section of the GRE

Here are some tips to help international students prepare for the Analytical Writing section of the GRE:

• Practice writing essays in English: Writing in a foreign language can be challenging, so it is essential to practice writing essays in English before taking the GRE. International students can practice writing essays on a variety of topics to improve their writing skills and become more comfortable expressing their ideas in English.
• Read sample essays: Reading sample essays can help international students understand the format and style of essays that receive high scores on the GRE. There are many sample essays available online that students can read and analyze to learn what makes a good essay.
• Plan and organize essays: Planning and organizing an essay before writing it can help international students stay focused and on-topic. Students should take a few minutes to brainstorm their ideas and outline their essay before starting to write.
• Use specific examples: Using specific examples to support a position can help international students demonstrate their understanding of the topic and provide evidence to support their argument. Students should try to use relevant and specific examples that demonstrate their knowledge and critical thinking skills.
• Proofread and edit essays: Proofreading and editing an essay can help international students catch errors in grammar, punctuation, and syntax. Students should take the time to read through their essay carefully and make any necessary corrections before submitting it.

Mastering the GRE essay scoring requires a step-by-step guide and a comprehensive understanding of the rubric used to evaluate the essays. By using the information provided in this GRE exam study guide, you can effectively prepare for the Analytical Writing section of the exam and improve your writing skills. Remember to address the task, provide relevant evidence, organize your ideas logically, and use standard written English appropriately. With these tips in mind, you can aim for a high score on the GRE essay and increase your chances of being accepted into your desired graduate program.

You can increase your chances of securing a stellar GRE score with GRE classes or online GRE coaching. For more information on GRE coaching in Mumbai and Online GRE classes visit Collegepond .

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GRE Essay LiveGrader

You've probably heard about the Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) essays on the GRE. They're nothing to fear, but you should know that the way they are graded is different from what you're used to.

The best way to prepare for the GRE essay is to write one and have it graded by an expert, using the same guidelines that are used for the real GRE. GRE Essay LiveGrader sm  helps you to do just that.

LiveGrader   sm  is a tool that we've developed to help you prepare for the GRE. All Princeton Review classroom, online, and tutoring students can submit their GRE essays which will then be graded by one of our GRE experts. Not only will our expert grader score your GRE essays, but he or she will also provide personalized feedback that will help you maximize your score on the AWA portion of the GRE.

Frequently Asked Questions about GRE Essay  LiveGrader sm

How is my gre essay graded.

After you submit your GRE essay, one of our expert graders will score it using the same guidelines that are used for the GRE. Essays will be scored holistically, which means that your GRE essay will be judged as a whole, not just on the basis of particular traits.

Who will grade my GRE essay?

A trained and certified Princeton Review expert grader will grade your GRE essay. Our experienced graders know what makes a strong GRE essay; many have graded thousands of essays.

Do I have to write about a specific topic for my GRE essay?

Yes. The essay "prompts" ask you to write on specific topics; one will ask you to analyze an argument, the other will ask you to analyze an issue. Your GRE essay must address the issues presented in the prompts. GRE essays written on any other topic will receive a score of zero.

How are the GRE essays different from the essays I wrote in school?

Unlike many essays you write in school, you'll only have 30 minutes, and you won't be able to use reference materials. Graders won't be expecting perfection; they will be judging your GRE essay for what it is: a first draft. Furthermore, the person grading your GRE essay will only spend 2–3 minutes evaluating your writing.

When I use  LiveGrader sm , will I receive just a score, or will I get comments too?

Your GRE essay will be given a score ranging from 0–6. LiveGrader will also provide you with personalized feedback. Your report will tell you what worked well on your GRE essay and how you can improve it to earn a higher score on the real GRE AWA.

How do I get my score?

We will e–mail your score and personalized feedback within 3–5 days after you submit your GRE essay. You can also access your score on the website, once it has been posted.

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GRE Score Calculator: How to Predict Your GRE Score

One of the hardest parts of navigating preparing for the GRE is trying to assess your performance. Predicting your eventual GRE score can feel impossible at times. We’re here to help with everything you need to know about how the test is scored. We also have a GRE score calculator to help you predict your test day performance.

GRE Score Calculator: Table of Contents

The basics of gre scoring, raw scores, scaled scores, and percentile rankings, the ins and outs of gre difficulty, how many questions can i miss on the quantitative section, how many questions can i miss on the verbal section, scoring the analytic writing section, interactive gre score calculator, achieving your score goals.

The GRE consists of three main sections testing different skills sets : Quantitative, Verbal, and Analytical Writing. The Quant section is designed to test your ability to problem solve using mathematical models and numerical/measurable data. In the Verbal section you’ll show your ability to analyze and draw conclusions from written material. Finally, in the Analytical Writing section you’ll show off your ability to construct and convey strong arguments in essay form. While the sections test you on different material, there is one common denominator across the entire test. Fundamentally, the GRE is testing your ability to solve complex, and often confusingly constructed, problems under timed conditions. Yes, you’ll need to master vocab lists and math concepts to succeed. But in order to get your scores to the next level, you’ll need to master the unique nature of the GRE itself. Learning how it’s scored is one crucial step in this process.

The Verbal and Quantitative have the same score range. For the Verbal portion of the exam you will be asked to answer 27 questions in 41 minutes across two subsections. In the first you will answer 12 questions in 18 minutes. Then, you will answer 15 questions in 23 minutes. When it comes to Quant you will also answer 27 questions across two subsections, but you’ll have a total of 47 minutes. First, you’ll have 21 minutes to answer 12 questions. In your second section, you’ll tackle your remaining 15 questions in 26 minutes. Both Verbal and Quantitative are scored on a range that runs from the lowest possible score, 130, up to the highest score, 170. The 130–170 scale runs in 1-point increments.

The Analytical Writing section does things differently giving you 30 minutes to complete one “Analyze an Issue” task. During this thirty minute span you’ll be asked to read your prompt, brainstorm your essay, and write and proofread your draft. You’ll then be graded on a scale that ranges from 0.0 to 6.0 in half-point increments. The AW score does not factor into your overall composite score that some schools may ask for.

Verbal Breakdown

• Verbal Total Questions : 27
• Verbal Total Time : 41 minutes
• Verbal Section One : 12 questions, 18 minutes
• Verbal Section Two : 15 questions, 23 minutes
• Verbal Scoring Range : 130-170, in one point increments

Quant Breakdown

• Quant Total Questions : 27
• Quant Total Time : 47 minutes
• Quant Section One : 12 questions, 21 minutes
• Quant Section Two : 15 questions, 26 minutes
• Quant Scoring Range : 130-170, in one point increments

Analytical Writing Breakdown

• AW Total Time : 1 essay in 30 minutes
• AW Scoring Range : 0.0 – 6.0, in 0.50 increments

In doing your GRE research you’ve likely come across the terms “raw scores,” “scaled scores,” and “percentile rankings”. You may have wondered what differentiates these scores and, most importantly, which scores you should be focusing on. Luckily, it’s very easy to break down the differences between these terms. Let’s jump in!

On the GRE your raw scores are simply the number of questions you get correct in each of the Verbal and Quantitative sections . Each question within a section has the same point value as any other question. After your test, when you view ETS’s Diagnostic Service , you’ll be able to see the exact number of questions you got right in each section. This is your raw score.

Scaled Scores

If your raw scores are simply your number of correct answers, how do we get a score of 130-170? And why? Since not everyone takes the exact same GRE, ETS has to account for variations in difficulty caused by different tests and via section-level adaptability. Again, you may be asking why. But there’s a very good reason for this: to ensure that graduate schools can evaluate test takers on a level playing field. Through a process called equating, ETS turns your raw score into a scaled score to better measure your performance against all other test takers in a given time period. Most graduate programs are looking most closely at your Quant and Verbal scores. Programs that require you to deal with a lot of quantitative data – think economics, mathematics, biological sciences – will value your Quant score more. Fields like English, History, and other humanities programs will likely put a premium on your Verbal score. Some programs will want to see a strong performance across both sections.

Percentile Rankings

The final piece of the scoring puzzle is the percentile ranking . Your percentile shows directly how your scaled score stacks up against all other test takers during a specific time window. For example, a Verbal score of 156 has a percentile rank of 70. This means achieving a 156 Verbal puts your performance above 70% off all other test takers. There’s a wide disparity between sections though! The same scaled score of 156 on the Quant section has a percentile rank of only 49. Meaning that 156 on Quant only puts you above 49% off all other test takers.

Some programs will report on the percentile ranks of their admitted students rather than the scaled scores. So it’s important to research your targeted programs’ score requirements and preferences and then look at score and percentile charts.

What about overall scores? Some schools may say they are looking for a certain composite score, like 300. This is simply your Verbal and Quant sections added together. ETS does not release percentile ranks for the composite score and it’s generally not as important as hitting your section benchmarks. However, as always, it is important to make sure you are diligently checking in with each of the programs you are applying to in order to set your score goals.

Verbal and Quant Percentiles 2023-2024

AWA Percentiles 2023-2024

One of the most frequently asked questions we hear at Magoosh is “how does difficulty work on the GRE?” This is a great question and one that is at play on two different levels on the test. The first is on a question level.

Questions on the GRE fall into five different difficulty categories: Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard. Furthermore, each of the two sections that make up each the Verbal and Quant sections will be classified as Easy, Medium, or Hard. A common misconception is that an Easy section won’t have any Hard questions. Or that a Hard section will be entirely composed of Hard questions. While it can feel like this on test day, that’s not how the sections are actually constructed. Let’s look more closely at each of the sections.

Easy Section Breakdown: Quant

• Very Easy Questions : Around 25% of the questions.
• Easy Questions : Around 40% of the questions.
• Medium Questions : Around 30% of the questions.
• Hard Questions : Around 5% of the questions.
• Very Hard Questions : Around 0% of the questions.

Medium Section Breakdown: Quant

• Very Easy Questions : Around 10% of the questions.
• Easy Questions : Around 20% of the questions.
• Medium Questions : Around 50% of the questions.
• Hard Questions : Around 10% of the questions.
• Very Hard Questions : Around 10% of the questions.

Hard Section Breakdown: Quant

• Very Easy Questions : Around 0% of the questions.
• Easy Questions : Around 5% of the questions.
• Medium Questions : Around 25% of the questions.
• Hard Questions : Around 40% of the questions.
• Very Hard Questions : Around 30% of the questions.

Easy Section Breakdown: Verbal

• Very Easy Questions : Around 30% of the questions.
• Medium Questions : Around 20% of the questions.

Medium Section Breakdown: Verbal

• Easy Questions : Around 30% of the questions.
• Hard Questions : Around 20% of the questions.

Hard Section Breakdown: Verbal

• Easy Questions : Around 10% of the questions.

Making Sense of Section Adaptability and Difficulty

We’ve established that the GRE contains three difficulty levels for each section, but how does that work? What does it mean that the test is section adaptive? You can get a deeper dive here , but there are some basics to know before we dive into scoring.

First, the GRE is only adaptive from section to section. This means your performance on your first Quant or Verbal section, which will be at a Medium difficulty, will determine the difficulty level of your subsequent second section. It does not mean that the test will adapt to your performance within a section. Let’s look at two scenarios!

In the first scenario, you get six questions out of twelve right in your first Quant section. This means that you are extremely likely to get another Medium difficulty Quant section. This will somewhat limit your Quant score ceiling, but we’ll explore that more fully in a moment.

In the second scenario, you start your first Quant section by answering the first three questions in a row wrong. This will not change the difficulty of your remaining questions. The difficulty level of each section is locked in once you begin it. In this scenario, you could go on to answer your remaining nine questions correctly and secure a Hard second section.

The most important takeaway about scoring and difficulty is this: harder sections weigh more heavily in your score than easy ones . This means that you can only achieve a really great score if you do well enough on your first Medium section to get a Hard second section. The easier the second section, the lower your score ceiling will be.

A Note About Scoring

Before we jump too far into scoring details, I have to make an important disclaimer. The details of the scoring system, including the equating formula and all other algorithms, used in the GRE are known only by ETS. They have never revealed exactly how their scoring system works. So how do we know what we know? Our calculators and score charts are estimations and approximations based on analyzing lots and lots of publicly available data like official score charts and score reports. You should always read scoring data from us, and other sources, knowing that we’re providing you the best estimations possible, but they are still just estimations.

You may be wondering just how to trigger that Hard second section in Quant. Here are the rough thresholds. Keep in mind that your first Quant sections will always be of Medium difficulty.

Number of Correct Questions to Open an Easy, Medium, or Hard Quant Second Section

• Easy Second Section : Triggered if you answer less than approximately four questions right on your first section.
• Medium Second Section : Triggered if you answer around four to seven questions right on your first section.
• Hard Second Section : Triggered if you answer approximately eight or more questions right on your first section.

Possible Score Ranges Based on Second Section Difficulty

Now let’s look at some broad score thresholds based on the difficulty level of your second Quant section.

• 1st section Medium, 2nd section Easy : Your total Quant score is likely to fall in the 130-151 range, give or take 2 points.
• 1st section Medium, 2nd section Medium : Your total Quant score is likely to fall in the 136-158 range, give or take 2 points.

How to Hit the 50th/70th/90th Percentiles in Quant

• In order to get a Quant score in 50th percentile or better (157 and up) : Answer at least 19 questions correctly across both sections. It will be much easier to do this if you achieve the Hard second section, so you want to aim for answering at least 8 questions correctly on your first Quant go-around.
• In order to get a Quant score in the 70th percentile or better (163 and up) : Answer at least 24 questions correctly across both sections. You will have to get the second Hard section to achieve this score and will need to get at least 9 right in your first section to make this possible.
• In order to get a Quant score above the 90th percentile (169-170) : Answer at least 26 questions correctly, but more likely you will need to get every question on the Quant section correct.

For more in-depth scoring scenarios, check out this great post by Talha Omer.

How about the Verbal section? How do you trigger that Hard second section there? Here are the rough thresholds. Keep in mind that your first Verbal section will always be of Medium difficulty.

Number of Correct Questions to Open an Easy, Medium, or Hard Verbal Second Section

• Easy Second Section : Triggered if you answer less than approximately five questions right on your first section.
• Medium Second Section : Triggered if you answer around five to eight questions right on your first section.
• Hard Second Section : Triggered if you answer approximately nine or more questions right on your first section.

Now let’s look at some broad score thresholds based on the difficulty level of your second Verbal section.

• 1st section Medium, 2nd section Easy : Your total Verbal score is likely to fall in the 130-155 range, give or take 2 points.
• 1st section Medium, 2nd section Medium : Your total Verbal score is likely to fall in the 141-164 range, give or take 2 points.

How to Hit the 50th/70th/90th Percentiles in Verbal

• In order to get a Verbal score in 50th percentile or better (152 and up) : Answer at least 11 questions correctly across both sections. While you can do this with an Easy second section, it will be much easier to achieve with at least a Medium second section. Aim for getting at least 5 questions right in your first section.
• In order to get a Verbal score in the 70th percentile or better (156 and up) : Answer at least 15 questions correctly across both sections. You will have to get at least a Medium second section to achieve this score. You will need to get at least 5 right in your first section to make this possible.
• In order to get a Verbal score in the 90th percentile or better (163 and up) : Answer at least 21 questions correctly across both sections. While you can achieve this with a medium second section, you would need to get 8 questions right on the first section and all 15 right on the second to hit the 90th percentile. Aim instead for triggering the Hard second section by answering at least 9 correct questions in your first section.

The new, shorter GRE only features one essay in the GRE’s Analytical Writing section. These aren’t simply “right” or “wrong” questions like your other sections. So you won’t get a raw score that corresponds to a 40-point score range. Instead, the GRE AW essay is rated based on a rubric. The rubric’s score range is 0 to 6, and scores are calculated in half-point increments.

Instead of being adjusted for relative difficulty, AW essay questions are adjusted for differences between multiple scorers. Each AW essay is given to a human scorer. At the same time, the essay is also submitted to a computer scorer, ETS’s e-rater scoring engine . If the human score and the computer score for an AW essay are similar, the final score for the essay will be an average of the human and computer scores.

However, if the e-rater score is a lot different from the human score, a second human scorer will step in and give the essay an additional rating. In that case, the essay score will be the average of the two human scores.

While schools generally look more closely at your Quant and Verbal scores, your writing score does often matter. This is particularly true for programs where you are not submitting another writing sample or if you are an applicant who does not speak English as your first language. Aim for at least a 3.0 unless your program indicates that you should have a higher score. Typically programs that are very writing heavy, think humanities programs, will want to see higher AW scores.

Ready to figure out your target GRE score? Use our interactive GRE calculator! If you took a practice test , you can use those numbers to get an idea of your section and total scores. Simply adjust the sliders for each section to see both your section scores and your GRE total score. Once you have an idea of what score you are aiming for you can refer back to our information about how many questions you can miss to form an action plan.

The best way to achieve your score goal is to do consistent, smart practice. Magoosh can help with a Magoosh Premium Plan . We have tried and true study plans, step-by-step explanation videos, and practice tests. We also give you the ability to do customized practice sections under test-like conditions. With a Magoosh plan you can set up a mock first Quant section and work on hitting that magic correct questions number to hit your personal score goal!

Bhavin sets the vision and strategy for Magoosh, along with whatever else needs to be done. With a BS/BA in Economics and Computer Science from Duke University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, he’s on a mission to change the way people learn and how they think about learning. Years ago, Bhavin played on several Nationals-level ultimate frisbee teams. Today, he’s our resident gelato connoisseur.

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27 responses to “GRE Score Calculator: How to Predict Your GRE Score”

i got a score of 14 in quant section(both sections 14/20) but my final score was 153 instead of 158. Please explain this!

Where was this score from? An ETS powerprep test, Magoosh test, or elsewhere? This is a good example of equating, which you can read about here. The raw score is converted to a scaled score through a process that takes the difficult of the exam into account, so the process looks a bit different for each practice test that you take.

Hi, I am following 1- month preparation plan on Magoosh. According to that i’m on day 4. M doing the practice questions as per given in the plan but my estimated score is not showing any change in numbers. M not sure is it because i’m not improving or is there any way to reset my score on daily basis?

You must answer around 150 questions in each section before the score indicator will show any numbers. If you’re only on day 4, you may not have reached that threshold yet. Also keep in mind that since the score predictor is based on your overall performance—and does not weigh your most recent answers more heavily—it can be slow to adjust.

Hello, I am getting the same issues as Akash, I have been mostly getting “hard” questions for my Quant practice questions. Is this normal or is there something wrong? I did set my difficulty in the custom practice setting to adaptive, following the directions in the study plan.

Thanks Sung Joon Roh

I forwarded your question to our team of tutors. You should hear back from someone soon in a separate email! Keep in mind that as a Premium student, you can always use the purple “help” tab in your account to reach out to test prep experts!

Hi, I have been doing the quant practice problems and have only been getting “hard” questions, does my predicted score get scaled according to difficulty?

I noticed you were a GRE Premium student, so I forwarded your message to our team. 🙂 You should be hearing from someone in about 24-48 hours.

Hello, I am getting 17/40 in verbal and 35/40 in quant what would be my GRE score Please do reply

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to predict your final GRE score just based on raw scores. This is because GRE questions have different difficulty levels, and also have adaptive changes to level form one section to the next. Sorry I can’t provide you with a concrete number. If you want an instant GRE score prediction that’s accurate, I recommend taking the PowerPrep II practice tests that Bhavin linked in the article above.

my raw score in verbal is for the first section is 9 and the second is 6 and in quant its is 15 and 17 how much is the score on 340?

Hi Gayathri,

We cannot say for sure because of the equating process that happens, but we can estimate that a raw score out of 40 by adding it to 130. So if you got 15/40 you would get approximately 145 and a 17/40 would be approximately 147. Of course, this could shift slightly higher or lower depending on equating, so you should assume a margin of about +/-3. 🙂

Is the mark affected by the time you submit your answer? For instance, if I finished all math questions in 15 minutes but get one question wrong, is there a probability I score a higher mark than the case where I check my solutions for another 15 minutes and submit a all-correct version after 30 minutes.

There aren’t extra points for finishing more quickly on the GRE, nor is there a penalty for getting through all the problems at a slower pace. Take the time you need! As long as you stay within the maximum time limit for each section, your score won’t be affected by your pace.

But I saw a “Your average pace” versus “Other’s average pace” section in the graph posted in this article. Is there a purpose for it or is it immaterial?

Hi Richard,

This chart is an analysis you receive on your dashboard when you have a Magoosh premium account. We show students what their pace is compared to their peers. This does not affect your scores, but provides you with helpful information on how you compare with your peers. For example, perhaps all your peers finish a specific problem in 50 seconds, but you take 2 minutes. This means that either you’re not completing the problem with the most efficient approach, or you struggle with this concept. Regardless, the speed does not affect your score, unless you cannot complete a section.

I currently have finished the first 50 verbal questions, and scored 144-149, I need at least a 150. Is this possible in a month?

I definitely think that you can see that sort of improvement in a month, especially if you spend time learning the best strategies, expanding your vocabulary, and improving your reading comprehension skills. You can check out the verbal section of our blog for tips and strategy, or you can check out our full Magoosh product which includes comprehensive lesson videos and practice questions guaranteed to improve your score! On average, our students improve their scores by 8 points, and many increase them by more than that. You can sign up for a free trial here: https://gre.magoosh.com/plans

Dear Mr. Paikh,

In response to one of the queries you mentioned that Magoosh score predictor does not take pace or difficulty into account. Currently, I am in a beginner level. Suppose, while answering a very difficult question, I took a long time to answer that correctly; without considering difficulty level and pacing the prediction could be misleading. As in the “practice” test, I might answer that question correctly with the cost of leaving few other questions unanswered due to unbalanced time pacing. If possible please take this as a request to take into account pacing and difficulty level to predict score.

Hello. I have GRE in the next week and I have just given a practice test on the magoosh and my score is: 167+154 (Q+V) previously, i have given some mock tests as well. The problem is that i gave powerprep way too early However, these are my scores: Powerprep: 162+150 (Q+V) Manhattan: 160+156 Kaplan: 164+150

So, i was wondering if the final score will be same as the score i got in the magoosh. Thank you 🙂

Hello! I’m studying for my test now, and I think one thing that would be useful is if you had two options to view your predicted scores – one that shows your first attempt at the questions, and one that incorporates your most recent attempt at the questions. When I first started I was getting like 75% of the quant, but then I went back and redid like 20 questions that I had originally gotten wrong, and now it’s showing my quant average at like 95%… which obviously isn’t accurate. Since this is a bit misleading about what my test-day-score will probably be, I would rather have the option to know my original (first attempt) average to see if I’ve been able to pull it up with my additional days of studying. For example, if I was getting 75% in the first couple days, but am now hitting like 90%, I’d like to see a predicted score of around 82%, rather than 92%. Hope this makes sense!

Hi! I am wondering if you could help me figure out if my scores on the practice tests are good or not. I took 3 practice sections so far (2 verbal & 1 math) and I scored 70% on each of them. I was kind of distracted for the math part and could have done a little better. Could you tell me what my score would be if I have a 70% average in both sections? Also, is this an average score? I don’t need amazing scores, I just want to have decent ones to get into grad school for nutrition at a state school. Thank you!

Hey Natalie, thanks for sharing! Your score will vary based on how reliable the practice test is. Which practice test did you use (there are a lot out there that aren’t great.) We recommend using Powerprep from ETS, the makers of the GRE. Their tests are free and will give you a rough score estimate. Also, if you have a Magoosh account, you can take our practice tests which also give you a score estimate. As for averages, I recommend checking out this post https://magoosh.com/gre/2013/average-gre-scores/

Hope that helps! Bhavin

Does the score predictor change every 50 questions? I’ve answered more than 100 practice questions but it doesn’t seem that my score is changing.

Good question! The score predictor takes all the questions you have answered into account, so you’ll see less movement the more questions you answer. You can also take a practice test to assess your current score. The “Take a practice test” link is just above the green Math and Verbal buttons on the Dashboard. I hope that helps!

In your testimonials, your students seem to agree that their score was accurately predicted in their estimated range, so clearly you are doing something very right. However, I am still curious about one thing. After taking all the quizzes in the Magoosh Math curriculum, I got an estimated score (for the first 50 questions as you mentioned). However, the quizzes are made of mostly easy questions. I began to wonder if I would see my score drop off as I continued to use Magoosh. Therefore, I ask, does the function you use to estimate the students’ scores uses the difficulty and the their average pace directly in estimating a score?

Good question! You may see a bit of a drop off if you’ve only completed the quiz questions, since they are mostly easy. Essentially, the more questions you answer (across all difficulties) the more accurate your estimated score will be. For a better indication of your score, you can also take a practice mock test, using the “Take a practice test” link on the Dashboard. The estimated score function does not take pace or difficulty into account; however, since the mock tests questions range in difficulties and have a fixed time frame (similar to the actual GRE), they provide a better indication of actual score. The mock tests also test stamina — taking a test for 4 hours is not easy 🙂 I hope that helps!

GRE AWA Section: Scoring and Essay Examples

The Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) section of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is designed to assess your ability to think critically and express your ideas in a clear and well-structured manner. In this article, we'll explore how the GRE AWA section is scored, what the scorers are looking for, and provide examples of essays that received different scores.

 Scoring in the GRE AWA Section

The GRE AWA section consists of two tasks: the Issue task and the Argument task. Each task is scored on a scale of 0 to 6, in half-point increments. Your scores on the two tasks are then averaged to give you an overall AWA score, which also ranges from 0 to 6.

Here's how the scoring is typically interpreted:

- 6.0: Outstanding - A top-tier essay that effectively and insightfully addresses the topic and demonstrates strong critical thinking and writing skills.

- 5.5: Strong - A well-crafted essay that effectively addresses the topic and displays sound critical thinking and writing abilities.

- 5.0: Competent - A competent essay that adequately addresses the topic and shows reasonable critical thinking and writing skills.

- 4.5: Adequate - An adequate essay that addresses the topic but may lack depth in critical thinking or writing.

- 4.0: Limited - A limited essay that may have difficulty addressing the topic or may lack coherence and organization.

- 3.5: Weak - A weak essay that minimally addresses the topic and shows limited critical thinking and writing skills.

- 3.0: Poor - A poor essay that fails to address the topic and lacks clear organization and critical thinking.

- 2.5 and below: Very Poor - A very poor essay that is incoherent, irrelevant, or completely off-topic.

 What Scorers Are Looking For

Scorers evaluate your essays based on the following criteria:

1. Clarity and Cohesion: 

Is your essay well-organized and easy to follow? Are ideas connected logically and coherently?

2. Critical Thinking: 

Do you demonstrate strong analytical and reasoning skills in your response? Are your arguments well-founded?

3. Use of Evidence: 

Do you provide relevant evidence and examples to support your arguments? Are they well-explained and effectively integrated into your essay?

4. Control of Language: 

Is your writing clear, concise, and free from major grammatical and syntactical errors? Do you use language effectively to convey your ideas?

5. Understanding of the Topic: 

Did you accurately and comprehensively address the topic? Did you show a clear understanding of the issue or argument presented?

 Essay Examples and Scores

Here are two sample essays for each task, along with their corresponding scores:

 Issue Task: Sample Essays

Essay 1 (score: 5.5):.

In our fast-paced world, where multitasking is the norm, it's easy to overlook the value of leisurely, in-depth exploration. Some may argue that instant access to information through technology has made deep learning unnecessary, but that's not the case. Deep learning enhances critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. For instance, reading an entire book allows readers to grasp the author's nuances, recognize the subtleties in character development, and form a well-informed opinion. Shallow learning, on the other hand, often leads to superficial understanding. The pursuit of deep knowledge is essential in our information-saturated society.

Essay 2 (Score: 3.0):

Technology has revolutionized how we learn and access information. In today's world, we can quickly find answers to our questions online, making deep learning unnecessary. Who needs to spend hours reading books when they can get answers instantly? The value of deep learning has diminished in the age of technology.

 Argument Task: Sample Essays

Essay 1 (score: 6.0):.

The argument presented in the passage is flawed due to several critical assumptions. Firstly, it assumes that an increase in sales of the medication is solely due to the advertising campaign. It ignores other factors that could have contributed to the rise in sales, such as increased demand for the product due to seasonal illness. Secondly, the argument assumes that the increase in revenue directly correlates with improved health outcomes. However, it provides no evidence to support this claim. A more rigorous analysis, including a comprehensive study, is required to establish any causal relationship. Therefore, the argument is unpersuasive and unconvincing.

Essay 2 (Score: 4.0):

The argument posits that the advertising campaign is the sole reason for the increased sales of the medication and that this increase will lead to improved health outcomes. However, these claims are unsupported by evidence. The argument fails to consider other factors contributing to sales and lacks data to establish a clear causal relationship between increased sales and health outcomes. Therefore, the argument is unconvincing and should be substantiated with more comprehensive research.

 Conclusion

Scoring well on the GRE AWA section requires strong critical thinking, clear writing, and the ability to address the topic effectively. To achieve a high score, practice is essential. Reviewing sample essays and understanding what scorers are looking for can help you improve your writing and analytical skills, ultimately leading to a better AWA score on test day.

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Free Resources

• 1. Introduction to GRE Analytical Writing
• 2. Issue Essay vs Argument Essay: 11 Key Differences
• 3. 7 Major Factors That Boost Your AWA Score
• 4. The 6 Step Process to Conquer GRE Analytical Writing
• 5. Examples and Analyses of Perfect 6.0 AWA Essays
• 6. 6 Types of False Reasoning You Should Avoid on the Argument Essay
• 7. How to Finish an Essay in 20 Minutes: 9 Effective Strategies to Save Time on the AWA Section
• 8. Top 101 Transitional Words and Phrases You Should Use to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section
• 9. 27 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Writing Your AWA Essays
• 10. Bonus Chapter – Mind-Blowing Templates to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section

The Advanced Guide to GRE Analytical Writing

71 mind-blowing tips, techniques, and strategies to score a perfect 6.0 on the awa.

Written By Jitta & Sachin

Introduction to GRE Analytical Writing

Getting a 99 percentile score on either of Verbal and Quant sections on the GRE requires several weeks, if not months, of diligence, patience, practice, and smart prep. But with only a fraction of the hard work you put in for Math and Verbal, and just a few days of practice, you can easily get a 99 percentile score on the AWA section. Plus, getting a 6.0 on the AWA isn’t a regular occurrence, and only about 8000 test takers around the world do it every year. So, if you can be one of those guys, you will be famous not only among your friends, but also among the admissions committees.

Unfortunately, the AWA is the most neglected section on the GRE. Test takers across the world believe that they can easily master AWA in a day or two. And look at what they end up with: The average AWA score of a GRE test taker worldwide is a mere 4.0, and the average AWA score of an Indian test taker is even lower. Now, to most Indian students, getting a 4.0 on the AWA might seem like an impressive feat. But in reality, 4.0 is considered just average in most countries. And on top of it, getting a 6.0 isn’t really as tough as it seems. It is only that you don’t know how.

If you are looking to score a perfect 6.0 on the AWA section, you will have to be a lot more planned than most other students. Just as with the Verbal and Quant sections, mastering the essay section on the GRE requires the same amount of confidence, persistence, and practice. And in addition to all that, you will also need a solid guide that can help you with all the strategies and tips. You will need an AWA Bible, so to speak.

But sadly enough, there isn’t much useful information on the internet about this frequently neglected section. Yes, there are some good articles and sample 6.0 essays that you can get with a simple Google search, but nowhere on the internet is a definitive guide to help you write a 6.0 essay on the GRE. And that is why, we at CrunchPrep, decided to provide you with a complete, advanced guide to scoring a perfect 6.0 on the AWA. And hey, don’t blame us if the 6.0 percentile goes down from 99 to 80 soon.

What is the AWA all about?

The Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) portion of the GRE consists of two essays, each of which you will need to write in 30 minutes or less. The two essays you will see on the GRE are, Analysis of an Issue and Analysis of an Argument. These two essays will always come first on your GRE test, no matter what. You cannot simply skip off AWA, move on to the other sections, and come back later. AWA itself is a separate section, and only after you finish writing the two essays can you move on further.

Despite what most students say, you should remember that the AWA only tests how well you can write an essay, and hence measures only your writing abilities. Contrary to popular opinion, the AWA does not analyze your thought process. As long as your essay sounds logical, writing ability is all it measures. We will be discussing more about this in the upcoming sections.

How important is the AWA?

It is a widely known fact that your AWA essay score is not as important as your composite math and verbal score on the GRE, and getting a 5.0 or 6.0 won’t make or break your chances of getting admitted to the university of your choice. Graduate school admissions officers only bother about your AWA score, if it is too low, or significantly lower than their usual class average. Yes, a poor score on the AWA can definitely send up a red flag, and the admissions committee will certainly think twice before letting you in. Sometimes, they even go to the extent of rereading your SOP and LORs, to find out if they were actually written by you or someone else. So, it is rather safe to say that the AWA score is an important enough factor when it comes to admissions.

What is the score range for AWA?

The AWA score ranges between 0 and 6.0, with 0.5 point increments. But what exactly does it mean to get a 6.0, or 4.0 or for that matter, a 0 on the AWA? Well, the scoring system is designed in a way that your responses to each of these essay questions are scored on a 6-point scale, with 6 being the highest score and 1, the lowest. Given below, are the parameters that ETS looks at when grading your AWA essays:

6.0 – Outstanding:

A well-articulated critique of the argument/issue, demonstrating mastery of effective writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

• Clearly identifies and analyzes the most important features of the argument with deep insight.
• Develops cogent ideas, organizes them logically, and connects them properly without sudden transitions.
• Supports the main points of the critique strongly.
• Demonstrates superior control of the English language, including diction, sentence formation, spelling, grammar and syntactic variety used in standard written English.
• Few to no flaws in the essay.

5.0 – Strong

A well-developed critique of the argument, demonstrating good control of writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

• Clearly identifies the important features of the argument and analyzes them thoughtfully.
• Develops ideas clearly, and connects them logically, with appropriate transitions.
• Gives a very sensible support to the main points of the critique.
• Has clear control of language, including diction and syntactic variety
• May have minor flaws like spelling errors, but no major flaws.

4.0 – Adequate

A satisfactory critique of the given argument, demonstrating decent control of writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

• Capable of Identifying and analyzing the main features of the argument.
• Develops and organizes ideas satisfactorily, but some important connections and transitions may be missing.
• Supports the main points of the critique.
• Demonstrates sufficient control of language, but may lack syntactic variety.
• May have many minor flaws or some major flaws.

3.0 – Limited

A satisfactory essay with clearly flawed critique of the argument, demonstrating little control of the elements of writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

• Does not identify or analyze many of the important features of the argument.
• Has limited logical development and no proper organization of ideas.
• Offers support of little relevance and value for points of the critique
• Uses language imprecisely and/or lacks sentence variety
• Contains occasional major errors or frequent minor errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics

2.0 – Seriously Flawed

An unsatisfactory essay with serious weakness in analytical writing skills, and displaying the following characteristics:

• Demonstrates no understanding of the main features of the argument.
• Almost no analyses of the main points have been made.
• Does not develop any ideas or is disorganized
• Provides nil to few relevant evidences.
• Has frequent serious problems in the use of language, grammar, spelling, and sentence structure.

1.0 – Fundamentally Deficient

An essay full of fundamental deficiencies in analytical writing skills, and displaying the following characteristics:

• Provides little to no evidence of the ability to understand and analyze the main idea.
• Failure to develop an organized response.
• Contains severe and persistent errors in language and sentence structure
• Has an unusually frequent pattern of errors in grammar, usage, and logic.
• A totally incoherent response.

0.0 – Unscorable

A paper that is totally illegible or obviously not written on the assigned topic. A score of zero is given to responses that come under one of the following cases:

• The responses are off topic.
• The responses are written in a language other than English.
• The responses are a mere copy of the given topic.
• The responses consist only of random keystroke characters.
• No response.

So, it is safe to say that if you write at least a few sentences in English, you will get a score of 1.0. But rest assured, no university under the sun will accept a score that low.

How is the AWA graded?

Each of your AWA essays is scored on a scale of 0 to 6. Two readers will read your Issue essay and assign it a deserving score and two different readers will read your Argument essay and assign it a score. Each grader will award a 6.0 to the top essays and scores of 0 are reserved for essays written on topics other than the one assigned or written in a foreign language. The graders spend about 30 seconds to 2 minutes on each essay, and give it a score based on pre-defined evaluation metrics such as the overall quality of your critical thinking and writing, as mentioned previously. The graders who evaluate the responses are college and university faculty members from various subject matter areas, including higher education.

Once the readers finish grading your essay, the two scores will be averaged to arrive at a final AWA score. If the grades given by the two readers differ by more than a point, a third, highly experienced grader is brought in to resolve the discrepancy (i.e., determine your final score for that essay).

For each essay, your final score is the average of the scores assigned by the two readers or the adjusted score assigned by the third reader.

Here’s how a typical Analytical Writing score might be derived:

If you earned scores of 6 and 5 on the Analysis of an Issue, then your final score for the Issue essay would be the average of these two i.e., (6 + 5) /2 which equals to 5.5 and if you earned scores of 4 and 5 on the Analysis of an Argument, your final score on the Argument essay would be (4 + 5) /2 which equals to 4.5.

Your final AWA score will be the average of your scores on Issue and Argument essays i.e., (5.5 + 4.5) /2 which equals to 5, which will be your final AWA score.

It should be noted that though your AWA scores range from 0 – 6, about 90 percent of all scores fall between 2 and 5. The average score for the AWA section for all the test takers so far is around 4.2.

Your Analytical Writing Assessment scores are computed and reported separately from the multiple-choice sections of the test and have no effect on your Verbal, Quantitative, or Total scores. Your score report however will not include copies of your responses; only scores are sent. You will receive your essay scores approximately 10-15 days after your test date.

What do graders look for in your AWA essays?

Most students think that essay length the only important factor when it comes to AWA scoring. But, in reality, it is not. Of course, it is one of the most important factors , but it isn’t the only factor. You will have to take many other factors into consideration, if you are looking to get anywhere near the perfect score. We have complied a list of all the factors that affect your overall AWA score, so you can be well prepared, while improving your writing skills on those lines.

The 7 Elements Graders Look For:

This is the most important, and also the most fundamental of all factors that the graders judge your essays on. The grader should understand what you are trying to say, by reading once. This makes their job easier, and they will understand that if it can be understood with just a single reading, then your essay has clarity.

As we discussed earlier, the grader can spend a maximum of only two minutes per essay, and it is your duty to make sure your essays have clearly composed ideas, because more often than not, graders do not bother to reread your essay and waste another couple of minutes. Consequently, you will end up with a score much lower than what you actually deserve.

Ask yourselves these two questions when you are writing the essays. What are you trying to say? What’s your main point? These two questions must have solid answers by the time the grader finishes reading the essay. If you think about it, these are the exact same questions you will have to answer, during Reading Comprehension. Just like how you can easily solve a Reading Comprehension question if you have answers to those two questions, graders assessing your essay will also need to find answers to these exact same questions, if you need a perfect score. Substance matters more than any other factor when it comes to your essays. So, make sure you have solid points, and clear logical reasoning that can be easily understood.

2. Structure

You should have seen it coming; structure is the second most important factor on your essays. The way an article is formatted, has a massive impact upon its readability. Your essays should read like a story; something that can be easily understood, and something that has a proper structure and organization. So, it is important that you break up your essay into distinct paragraphs, each with its own meaning and context, while maintaining a smooth transition between one paragraph and the next.

This way, every paragraph reads like a separate story, and the essay graders can easily scan through your entire response easily. Plus, since the transitions are smooth, and there aren’t any sudden twists in your response, it will make the grader’s job a whole lot easier.

So, ideally, you should have a structure in mind before you begin writing the essay. The general structure is to start with an introductory paragraph followed by 3-4 body paragraphs and finish off with a conclusion paragraph. So, you should make sure that there are at least 5-6 paragraphs in your essay, if you want a solid score on the AWA.

3. Sentence Variety

Even though you are writing several paragraphs on the same topic, you should ideally avoid writing similar or same sentences. If you are an avid reader of news, you get the point. No good writer under the sun writes two exactly same sentences in a single essay or article. Consecutive sentences with the same structure and length can sound monotonous and lifeless, and will obviously bore the reader.

Instead of sounding repetitive and boring, use sentence style skillfully. But this doesn’t mean you should rearrange the words, or chance the voice from passive to active or vice versa. It simply means that you should use a different variety of words to mean the same thing.

For example, if you have already written the sentence ‘The most important virtue of a leader is a strong sense of ethics.’, and if you have to use the same sentence at a later point in the essay, you should try and rephrase that same sentence and write something like this: ‘A strong moral framework is paramount for any leader.’ Get the point?

In this way, you should keep varying the sentence structures, flow and rhythm by switching between short and long sentences. You should also make use of transitional and signal words to vary sentence openings and endings.

4. Vocabulary

There has been a longstanding myth among test takers that the GRE really loves heavy vocabulary, and using it on your AWA essays will boost your score. Well, this isn’t true at all. We have seen students with exceptional vocabulary but poor coherence get paltry AWA scores in the past. And we have seen students with great essay scores without using heavy vocabulary.

Like we said earlier, the AWA is not testing how much vocab you have in your arsenal. There’s Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion for that. AWA only tests how logically you can deduce information and write a reasonable critique about an issue or an argument made by someone else. So, don’t buy those myths. As long as you use sensible reasoning, proper grammar and as long as you can defend your point intelligently and use precise vocabulary to convey meaning effectively, you should be alright. It is not needed that you use heavy vocabulary or GRE words.

5. Language and Grammar

Though officially ETS says you may have minor errors in the essay copy, that doesn’t mean you can ignore silly mistakes. Even though the mistakes or errors do not interfere with overall meaning and coherence, you should understand that the time you make your first error on the essay, the grader will notice it, and will be more conscious while reading the rest of the copy. The grader will be even more vigilant to see if there are any visible or obvious blunders that you have made, and this can have a negative impact on your AWA score. So, try and make sure your essay is as spotless as possible, and eliminate all errors before submitting. Take time to proofread your essay, once you finish writing it. Don’t be in a hurry to submit it off and skip to the next section.

6. Reasoning

Reasoning plays a key role in determining the overall quality of your essay. You should always look to include as many logically compelling reasons as you can to support your stance. One of the most important features about a compelling essay is its ability to convince the reader by means of sound logical reasoning. Anyone who reads your response should be totally convinced of your view point, without having second thoughts. To be able to write such a compelling and well-reasoned copy within 30 minutes would be rather difficult, but you can definitely do it with a lot of practice.

So ideally, you should be able to connect your ideas properly to the central theme or idea of the essay, and convince the reader to agree to your point of view. If the essay doesn’t sound logical or reasonable, you will unfortunately have to pay the penalty, no matter how long the essay is.

7. Evidence

In order to make your essay sound reasonable and logically sound, you will obviously need to provide sufficient evidences. If you want to impress the readers, and convince them to agree to your point of view, you will ideally want to provide convincing evidence to back up your thesis. Search for evidences, either direct or implied, and connect them with the essay. You can even create some random examples and evidences, as long as they fit the bill and don’t sound too random. Develop examples that cogently reinforce your thesis is key to a high essay score.

So, those are the 7 most important elements that graders look for in your essays. Make sure you have all these things covered in your essay, and you’re sure to see a perfect score.

Should you skip the AWA section during practice?

This is probably a question that is on the minds of many students. Almost half of the GRE test takers are native English speakers. And these students tend to neglect practicing the AWA section at home, because according to them, it’s not worth investing time on something they are very confident about. But, there are a few vital points that they don’t realize. We’ve observed what students do when they practice for the GRE, how their approaches have affected their scores on test day, and figured out four reasons as to why the AWA section is an extremely important aspect of the GRE exam.

Number 1 Reason Why Practicing GRE AWA is Important: Inflated Scores During Practice:

This is the single most important thing to consider when we talk about the importance of the essay section. Students normally tend to skip the essay section when they take practice tests, so they can directly go to the first section of Math/Verbal. Though this might seem like the obvious choice to you, you should consider the aftereffects before jumping into conclusions.

Think about it. The GRE is not a typical test that you encounter at college or elsewhere. It is a marathon. An intense, 3 hour 45 minute journey, which obviously you aren’t accustomed to. Now, if you skip the essay section during practice, you’ll be forfeiting 60 minutes of the total test time, which means you are going to have to sit for 2 hours and 45 minutes only.

This translates into an inflated overall score during practice, because you are just that much more active than you will be on test day. So, you get accustomed to sitting for 2 hours 45 minutes for the test, and your brain is hardwired to concentrate for that much time only. But, on test day, you still have two more sections to finish after you complete 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Do you get the point? It’s that extra one hour of concentration that requires sudden attention from your brain, which it sadly isn’t ready for. This is exactly why thousands of students score very low on their last two to three sections. They simply aren’t ready for the extra time, because their brains feel tired already. So, if you don’t skip the essay during practice, you’ll be writing in the exact test conditions as on test day, thereby training your brain for the big encounter.

There are a few other important reasons why you should not skip off AWA during practice , and we have discussed them separately.

How Long Should My Essay Be?

The essay graders are aware that you only get 30 minutes to write each AWA essay and they also know that you won’t be able to cover every possible argument, reason and rebuttal. Hence they do not expect you to write a super long detailed analysis of the issue or argument given to you. Remember that most GRE test takers won’t be able to find time to cover everything they would like to cover on the test.

So, how long should your AWA essay be? We see students wondering about this all the time and we know you would like to know about it too. ETS has not spoken out about the ideal length of an essay, and there is no word on the word limit as such. But there seems to be a pattern that appears on GRE sample essays that come along with the ETS official guide to the GRE.

When closely observed, there is a significant increase in the number of words from a 5.0 graded essay and a 6.0 graded essay. The reality is, longer essay is usually better. To analyze further on this topic, we have done a bit of research, and found out an interesting relation between essay length and the final score. If you look at the statistics below, you will have to concur with me. Longer essays usually score better on every essay topic.

If you are a long-essay fan and insist to pen a high scoring AWA essay on the GRE, you should write anywhere between 500-600 words. Don’t ask us why. The research shows that’s how it is, and if it true for a sample of 500 students, it must be true on a larger scale as well.

A column chart with average word count for essays from 500 students

As you can see, the longer the essay, the higher the grades. Notice that a 5+ point essay has length exceeding 500 words. Another interesting fact is, it seems as if 600 is an upper limit for word count. If you go beyond 600 words, you can see how the scores go down. This isn’t surprising, though. Almost no student on this planet can write a perfect 800 word essay under pressure in 30 minutes. If someone is shooting for a high word count, they are surely sacrificing on quality. So, it’s safe to say that 500-600 is what you should be looking at.

If you’d like to know more about the GRE essay length , we’ve done a separate post on that. Go check it out now.

Categorization of GRE Essay Topics

The most fascinating thing about the GRE essay section is that each and every essay topic that shows up on the real test is already published on the official ETS website. This may sound crazy because giving out the questions in advance is totally unnatural. By knowing the topics beforehand, you can prepare sample responses for all those topics and on the test day, all you need to do is just reproduce your sample response. Isn’t that a great advantage for you? You can get a perfect 6.0 score very easily!

But there’s a catch! You were expecting a few, aren’t you?

Well, there are close to 200 topics in all – far too many to practice responses in advance. Also, practicing each of these topics is not advisable as it is going to take a lot of time and effort and there is no point in mugging them up. You could as well spend this time on learning some math or vocabulary. However, there’s a good news. Just scanning through these two lists of essay topics will give you an excellent idea of the types of issues and arguments that show up on test day.

Now, most of the topics that show up on the GRE Essay section can be broadly grouped into five categories. I made things a bit easy for you and listed those five categories below. Take a look.

• Government/Politics
• Sciences and Technology

So, next time when you practice writing an essay response, make sure you write at least an essay from each of these categories.

How do I get ideas for the essay?

This is most likely the second most frequently asked question in our support mails by students around the world. It’s because a large number of issue and argument prompts on the official essay pool are hard to understand correctly. And when you don’t understand something, how can you write about that something?

So, what can you do about to solve this problem? Here are a couple of things you should work on:

If you were asked to write about a topic from out of nowhere, you would struggle for ideas. But when you already know that there could only be five categories from which your essay topics can show up, then you can turn the table in your favor. You should keep a few related examples for each one of these categories (i.e. education, arts, politics, technology, philosophy) as they will be handy and save you precious time on the test day.

Also, the essay prompts are full of obscure vocabulary and hence are hard to comprehend. Since, every essay prompt that could appear on the GRE is openly accessible on the official ETS website, you should give them a read through. While reading, you should also make note of all the unfamiliar words and later learn them. Learning these new words will ensure that you understand the topic well or at least allow you to take a very good guess.

How to get your essays graded?

Believe it or not, one of the most frequent questions that we receive from students around the world, is how they can get their essays graded. That is a good question, actually. Given the fact that there are so many practice tests for the GRE where you get your Math and Verbal sections graded, there is not even one practice test in the entire world that can grade your AWA score for you. If you are wondering why, it is because it is not at all easy to grade your essay instantaneously.

Think about it. Even on the test day, you will only receive your Math and Verbal scores, but not the AWA score. ETS itself takes about 7-10 days to give you an official report of your AWA score. It is that difficult to assess an essay. Plus, it is required that a human grader reads and grades your essays, if you want an accurate score. Which is obviously impossible if you are taking a practice test at home.

So what can one do? Is there no way to get your AWA essays graded? Well thankfully, there are quite a few options that you can consider. We’ve listed down all the available options, and it is up to you to decide which of them you want to choose.

5 Ways to Get Your AWA Essays Graded

Ets score it now.

The ETS Score It Now, is a great feature available for you to get your essays graded. For a small amount of $13 dollars, the ETS Essay Grader will grade two of your essays. You can submit any two of your essay responses, and the software will get back to you with a graded score of your AWA. Now, for most students around the world, and especially for those from the developing world, $13 is quite a lot of money.

And that is probably the reason why most students don’t even know that such a facility is available. We must agree, that even we at CrunchPrep have never used the service ourselves, or know any student who has, simply because we did not need to. Our expert tutors, on the other hand, have been grading student essays for free for a long time now. But nevertheless, we’re pretty sure that the ETS Score It Now feature will get you an accurate score, because well, it’s ETS who developed it.

And there is one more downside with this feature. The score is all you get, when you submit your essays. No feedback. Now, you would expect that ETS would give you some valuable tips to improve your score, but unfortunately, that $13 you spend is only going to get you a couple of numbers from ETS. So, unless you don’t need feedback, you are really not improving on the essay, and you have money to spend, you should definitely try and consider some other alternatives to this service offered by ETS.

Friends, Family, and Experts

Yes. However unbelievable it might seem, your friends can sometimes help you get better marks. They can help you identify the mistakes you did not find obvious enough, and you also get an outsider’s opinion on your essays, and therefore on your points of view. Now, even though your friends might be untrained, or unaware of the GRE AWA grading system, having a second pair of eyes look at your writing can be really beneficial to finding your flaws. Plus, you receive feedback then and there, right on your face, and it is sometimes the easier way to learn.

But before you let your friends or family judge your essays, you should tell them beforehand that you only had 30 minutes to write your essay, and so they should not expect you to write an award-winning piece. You should also tell them to pay attention to, and then judge you on the following aspects of your essay: structure, logical flow of ideas, and persuasiveness of examples. They should ideally not be looking for impressive words or sentence framing, but it is just an added bonus.

If however, you are too shy to ask your friends or family, try asking an experienced professor at your college, preferably a professor in linguistics or someone who is really good at formal, written English language. These professors not only give you an accurate assessment of your essays, but will also give you valuable insights as to where exactly you can improve your writing skills.

Self-Evaluation

When you don’t have access any professors or wise friends who can help you evaluate your AWA essays, the best option you are left with, is you. Self-evaluation, though most of the time not recommended, can be a really useful option for you. There are hundreds of mock essays on the internet, and with a simple google search, you can get access to various essays for the GRE. Even the ETS website has a few sample answers for essays, and the same questions have sample answers which are purposefully written to mirror a 6.0, or a 5.0 level essay, for example.

So, if you can compare your response with those on the internet, you can roughly estimate whether your answer is closer to the 4.0 or the 5.0 sample. If you can do this a lot of times, you will begin to see a definite pattern, which can help you estimate your average AWA score. Also, most mock essays usually have an explanation at the end, which explain why they have been given their respective scores. This really helps you see if your essay is lacking in similar ways.

This sounds rather difficult, and it actually a really complex and time taking process, which is why you should try and take this approach as a last measure; if you cannot find any other alternative helpful enough.

Internet Strangers

If you are an internet geek, you would probably agree that sometimes, internet strangers are really helpful in nature. There are many GRE forums like Urch , PaGaLGuY , etc, where you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of GRE experts and aspirants, who wouldn’t mind lending a hand. Thousands of GRE aspirants visit these forums every single day, and if you can post your essay and ask for some feedback, more often than not, someone will provide you with the necessary assistance. While this someone may or may not be an expert, it often helps to have a second opinion from someone in your niche.

GMATAWA.com

Alright. We’ve saved the best for the last. GMATAWA.com is probably the most fantastic resource out there, when it comes to grading your essays. It was developed to grade GMAT AWA essays, but rest assured, there’s not much difference between GMAT and GRE AWA essays. The basic structure of essays is the same everywhere, and this website is really helpful in grading your essays.

The grading happens instantaneously, and as soon as you submit your essay, you will receive a composite AWA score, along with various metrics on which your essay has been graded. We, at CrunchPrep, assure you that, other than ETS Score It Now , this is probably the most accurate AWA rater you will see, and you can expect a similar AWA score on your exam as well. So, make full use of this feature, and assess your writing strengths and weaknesses. However, you should remember that the website allows you to grade only 10 essays per email address, so choose wisely which essays you will be sending.

So, those are the five ways that you can get your AWA scores graded. Most often, more than one of the resources mentioned above will definitely be helpful to you. And by the way, remember this: Only two things can make you a better writer – Practice, and Feedback.

Issue Essay vs Argument Essay: 11 Key Differences

The Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) section of the GRE asks you to complete two separate but complimentary writing tasks: The Issue Essay and the Argument Essay. Each task tests your analytical writing skills, including the assessment of your critical thinking skills. Both these essay questions are allotted 30 minutes each and are scored on a scale of 6.0. And those are the only similarities between them both.

There are lots of differences between these two types of AWA essays that a majority of test takers are unfortunately unaware of. It is common to think that since both these are essay questions, there aren’t many differences between them. And most of the errors that students commit in this section are due to the confusions that exist between these two essay types. GRE Issue Essay and GRE Argument Essay are very different in nature, and hence you need different strategies to tackle them. We will go deep into each of these essay questions you will see on the GRE, but for now, remember that the GRE Issue Essay requires you to construct and support your opinions on a particular ‘issue’ that has been given to you, whereas the GRE Argument Essay requires you to validate the authenticity, or the logical correctness of an argument that someone else has constructed, without letting your opinions interfere with the task. Got the difference? Now, let’s move on to the finer details.

Issue Essay vs Argument Essay:

1. your view vs. their view:.

The GRE Issue Essay basically tests your ability to present an argument with your views, and your ability to convince the reader to agree to your point of view. As you can clearly see here, you should include your own views and add valuable points to your response, in order for the reader to be convinced to agree with you. On the other hand, the GRE Argument Essay requires you to completely analyze a brief argument written by another author, and to effectively critique the argument or the author’s point of view, by providing sufficient evidences, and by asking logical questions.

2. General Topic vs. Specific Topic

In an Issue Essay, the debatable topic that has been given to you to analyze, is very general in nature and can be from any field. It hence doesn’t usually require you to have a very deep knowledge of the topic. The issue is simply provided as a statement, and your job is to pick a side, stick to it until the end without fiddling around, and present your points of view, your analysis, and your final conclusions in a suitable manner.

However, in an Argument essay, the author himself already presents a case with his/her supporting evidences in the form of a paragraph. Your job is to see how logical the argument sounds, and check whether this argument is right or not, whether the argument has been made on solid grounds, with sufficient evidences or not. You should then effectively critique the argument, by choosing sides. If you choose to substantiate the author’s point of view, you can cite your own examples to strengthen the points, and if you wish to go against the given point of view, then you must be able to ask comprehensive questions that check the validity of the evidences provided in the argument.

3. Analysis vs. Reasoning:

The directions for answering the Issue and Argument essays are also different. The directions given for an Argument Essay read somewhat like this:

“Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on the assumptions and what the implications are if the assumptions prove unwarranted.”

Or like this:

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion, be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.

And the directions given for an Issue Essay are entirely different from the Argument Essay, and unlike the Argument Essay, the Issue Essay can be accompanied with a varied set of instructions, and there is no one particular direction for you to follow. For example, on the day of your test, you may see any one of the following directions, at the end of the issue:

• Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
• Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.
• Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.
• Write a response in which you discuss which view more closely aligns with your own position and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should address both of the views presented.
• Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.
• Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider the possible consequences of implementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.

4. Your Conclusion vs. Their Conclusion:

In an Issue Essay, remember that you must be able to introduce the issue at hand in your own words briefly, using your own conclusion , while in an Argument essay, the given argument must be introduced from the author’s point of view using his own conclusion . This is such an important difference between the two essays, and most students tend to do the opposite more often than not, which is why they end up with average scores. You should always be clear on whose conclusion you are taking into consideration: yours, or the authors. And this depends on whether it is an Issue Essay or an Argument Essay.

5. Reasons vs. Flaws:

The second paragraph in the Issue Essay is where you should be stating the side you have chosen, and also your reasons for standing by it. Whereas in an Argument Essay, the second paragraph begins with the biggest flaw that you have identified in the argument made by the author. You should also discuss how his conclusion made by the author overlooks this major flaw. The flaws in the author’s presented argument must be identified before you start writing your response, which makes it easy for you while critiquing the argument.

6. Real Examples vs. Hypothetical Examples:

In the Issue Essay, the body paragraphs (paragraphs 2, 3, and 4) must definitely involve relevant real world examples that support your chosen claim. Remember that the examples you provide must not only be relevant, but they must be real world, true examples. Which means, you cannot create examples out of thin air, on your own. But, in an Argument essay, you have the flexibility to create your own examples, as long as they are relevant to the given topic, and as long as they efficiently substantiate the argument that you are trying to make. The flaws made by the author that you have identified, must be stated with explanations and solid examples, which can sometimes be fake, as long as they fit the scenario you are trying to explain.

7. Appreciating vs. Questioning:

The conclusion statement in an Issue Essay always involves agreeing with the opposing viewpoint in one or two statements. Even though you might not like agreeing with the opposing viewpoint, you should mention that it can be right in a few instances too. You should do this in order to show your emotional maturity level. But, in an Argument essay, the conclusion statements ends on a note of doubt, where you claim that the argument may have one or more valid points but is otherwise entirely flawed, needs more plausible explanations, and requires more solid examples for it to be valid.

8. Agreeing vs. Disagreeing:

Agreeing to the point of view given in the Issue Essay gives you more points to write, since more often than not, the issue presented to you is a general topic, and there will be few points to go against, while there will be plenty of points to support the given claim in the issue. But we still advise students to go the negative route. We will discuss this later on.

But the scenario is entirely different when it comes to the Argument Essay. The Argument given is deliberately made to sound negative, and since the given argument requires a critical analysis of the presented claims rather than your own perspectives, you can, and hence should, go against the author’s point of view. Since more often than not the author’s point of view will be flawed, you will have lots of points to write, and it becomes easier for you to attack the author’s argument instead of trying to support it.

9. Limitation vs. Liberty:

A very important point you should remember is that in an Argument Essay, you should only prove that the evidences supporting the conclusion are inadequate, not that the conclusion itself is wrong. The conclusion is always right, but you should doubt or question the authenticity of the conclusion, meaning, ask how the author came to such a conclusion without sufficient supporting claims. But it is never wise to say that the conclusion itself is wrong, so you should rather limit yourself to saying that the conclusion needs more evidences. On the other hand, in an Issue essay you have the liberty use anything and everything to support your claim. Because the topic given is very general in nature, you may use any evidences to support your statements, even if they say that the conclusion is wrong.

10. Statement vs. Evidence:

The Issue Essay depends on outside, credible facts, because there are no evidences provided within the issue. The issue question is a simple, generalized statement, and there will be no evidences provided. Which is why you should go search for your own evidences, and decide if you want to support or question the conclusion made by the author. But the Argument Essay already has its own evidences provided within the paragraphs, which you will have to analyze and critique.

11. Two Sides vs. One Claim:

The Issue Essay is always like a two sided coin, presented as a contestable topic with two sides where you have the option to go with the side you can present best. The Argument Essay however does not have two sides for you to choose. It has only one claim which must be analyzed and critiqued.

In the GRE, AWA Section is very important as it shows off your communication skills and writing abilities. Looking out for these common differences between the Issue Essay and the Argument Essay, will help you avoid mistakes and prevent misconceptions. A better understanding of these differences and sufficient practice will help you score high in this section.

7 Major Factors That Boost Your AWA Score

It is important to note that the essay graders are reading your essay in a fairly short amount of time, usually between half a minute to two minutes max. So, rest assured that they are not going over your responses with a fine-toothed comb. Nor do the graders have any rulebook which they have to follow in order to add or subtract points from your overall score. There is no rule that says “subtract .5 points for every 3 grammatical errors in the essay.” Or “Add 1 point for every 5 impressive GRE words used in the essay.”

The graders are there to assess your essay holistically. Which means, they are gauging its overall effectiveness, and then assessing it, as humans. But how do they gauge effectiveness? Are there any metrics that usually have in mind while going through the essays? Yes. Fortunately, there are 7 major factors that that may stand out to a grader and help influence your overall AWA score.

Organization

Organization is given the foremost importance by many graders. And it isn’t that hard to understand why. Essays that are well organized are, in fact, easy to read. That’s important because you don’t want to make the grader’s job any more difficult than it already is. The grader has only a couple of minutes to read your entire essay, and poorly organized essays are hard to follow. This will lead the grader to give you a score lower than you actually deserve. But on the other hand, a well-organized argument is easy to follow. Since the graders are looking at your analytical abilities, it helps if they can follow your argument.

If you organization is unclear, however, then your argument is also likely to come across as unclear. In the next chapters, we will be discussing more about how your essay should be organized in order to get a high score.

Syntactical variety is a very key aspect of writing quality content. Your essays should always have a proper syntax, and you should be using a variety of sentences to make your writing look professional enough to get a perfect score. Syntax is a fancy word for how you organize words into sentences. And you already know how important organization is. You should always try to write clear sentences that are crisp and easy to understand. Unlike what most students believe, you don’t have to use extensive vocabulary, unless they really fit into the scenario. So, save the GRE vocabulary for Text Completion, and write your essays simply yet creatively. Again, you should remember that your grader has to read hundreds of essays on the same day, and they sometimes will not be thrilled to untangle a complex sentence that you have used. So, they naturally skip that sentence and read further. So, it is always better to write clearly and simply than to go for risky propositions and complex sentence structures.

A general finding is that longer essays tend to score higher than their shorter counterparts. This may be attributed to various obvious reasons. First of all, if you have written a pretty long essay, it means that you have a lot of insight into the given topic and you are able to address numerous issues relevant to the discussion. Second, if you can write a 500 word essay coherently within 30 minutes, you will be considered as a voracious writer in general. These are the abilities that are usually likely to impress a grader.

But, make sure that the quality of the essay is maintained throughout the length and breadth of your essay, for, if you don’t maintain quality, you might come off as someone who is just trying to impress but is unable to organize and prioritize their thoughts. Long essays that are clearly organized, use professional language, and contain strong supporting evidences, and give enough reasons to the grader to give you a better score. We’ll soon discuss more on this.

Your essay response should definitely contain quality instances of premises, facts or reasons given to support the conclusion that you are trying to make. Your essay needs to contain some sort of supporting evidence, whether it be logical, statistical, factual, or other forms of justifications. Without proper support, your essay will not be able to effectively develop a firm position on the given argument or issue, and it certainly fails to persuade the reader’s opinion. So, make sure you always look for supporting evidences, and provide them wherever needed.

Like discussed erstwhile, you’re going to have to come up with a lot of examples that help illustrate the point you’re trying to prove, if you want to make your essay stand apart from the rest of the pack. Since test takers have a mere 30 minutes to write these essays and will never know the topic beforehand, the graders are used to seeing a lot of hypothetical examples. And this is completely okay. As long as you make sure that the examples fit the point you are trying to explain, it is completely fine. But the way to make your essay stand out is to use real life examples. I know it is very difficult, but if you are lucky enough to have some background about the given topic, you should try to include an expert opinion within the essay, and if you can, you should try and add relevant facts, statistics, and case studies to your essay.

Although the AWA does not test your grammar skills and the caliber of your writing, if your essay has a lot of grammar errors and spelling errors, it raises a serious red flag in the mind of the graders. This often happens because students tend to think that they can outsmart the grader by using fancy sounding words once in a while. While doing this doesn’t hurt, it is important to remember that you should only use words you actually know. Sometimes, students might not know the exact meaning, or even worse, the spelling of a big word that they heard somewhere, but they still go ahead and use it in a sentence. And obviously, they will be wrong, one way or the other. Now, while spelling is not one of the criteria the graders look for in your essay, nothing gives them a red flag like reading “Sevaral entreprenuers” or “primery hypothesys”. These are regular words used every day, and if you cannot spell them right, your score is bound to go down. Remember that unlike MS Word or other desktop word processors, there is no spell check or grammar check available on the GRE AWA. So, don’t hurt your score by using words whose spellings you don’t know.

The word processor on the GRE is quite basic in nature. You’ll have basic keyboard functions, plus three other features: cut, copy, paste, and undo. And that’s all. No other shortcuts or spell checks or other advanced features like bold and underline. Now, these functions work exactly as they do on your computer. You can cut text from a portion of your essay and paste it in at a different point. Or you can use undo to delete your typing. Use these features and reduce the time you spend on editing your essay. Learn how to use these features, if you are new to them, and practice speed typing at home.

This is really essential in these days of email and text messaging, where most of the younger population use chat language and shortened forms of words like lyk, hw, wat, imma etc. While this form of English is of no good anywhere in your life, it is especially frowned upon by the GRE community. So, if you find yourself using these sort of words in your essay, which has often happened in the past with many students, you will see your score go down suddenly and rapidly. So, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little typing practice at home before test day.

So, those are the seven major factors that help you boost your essay score on the GRE. You should analyze your AWA essays whenever you take a practice test, and see if your essays have all of these.

The 6 Step Process to Conquer GRE Analytical Writing

Here we discuss the step by step process you should implement, if you want to write powerful AWA essays in under 30 minutes and get a 6.0 score. Each of these steps discusses what you should exactly do, so as to make things easier for you on test day. All you need to do is follow these steps during practice, and get these tips into your head without much effort. Though the Issue and Argument Essays are quite similar when it comes to answering, we have given you separate step by step process to ace them both.

AWA Issue Essay:

The Analysis of an Issue essay tests your ability to “explore the complexities of an issue or opinion and, if appropriate, to take a position that is informed by your understanding of those complexities.” What this means is you should properly analyze the given issue and take a strong position: either negative or positive, and then elucidate examples as to why you have chosen that particular side.

The specific directions for the issue essay task are given like this: “In this section, you will need to analyze the issue presented and explain your views on it. There is no “correct” or “best” answer. Instead, you should consider various perspectives as you develop your own position on the issue.”

Before you begin writing your response, you should take a couple of minutes to think about the issue and plan a proper response before you begin writing. This helps you organize your ideas and develop them fully. Make sure to leave sufficient time to reread your response and make any revisions that you think necessary.

Following are the six simple steps that you should follow in the same order, if you want to pen down a powerful AWA Issue essay.

Step 1: Read the Essay

Obviously, this must be your first step. But you don’t just read the essay. You must perform a ‘smart read’. A smart read is where you read the prompt and figure out the central issue, and jot down this issue on your scratch paper, including some of the important concepts from the given topic. This is what more than 95% of students fail to do. Rather than juggling all your thoughts inside your mind, it is a lot easier to pen down whatever you have understood from reading the prompt in your own words.

Your work on this first step gets you grounded for the essay ahead. After reading the given issue, and writing it down in a few concise words, you should be able to understand exactly what the issue is and also what some of the crucial concepts related to that issue are.

Step 2: Brainstorm Reasons and Examples

This is perhaps the most crucial step of all, and this step is also where most of the heavy lifting gets done. Once you know what points you want to prove and what examples you will use to prove that point, writing the essay will be very easy. Half of the duty lies in brainstorming efficient examples and supporting reasons to supplement your point of view. So, make sure you spend adequate time on this step. Pre-planning before you start writing is of the utmost importance, because then, you will have a continuous flow of thought while writing, and there won’t be any wastage of time. If you start writing without thinking through the issue or planning the structure of your essay, you run the risk of wasting time on editing and re-editing your points.

Or even worse, you might reach a dead end and there is no more evidence left with you to substantiate your point of view, but you’ve already spent 20 minutes on the essay that you cannot go back and write a fresh piece. So, it is important that you take the time to brainstorm some examples and then pick a side. After you’ve written down the central issue and the key concepts, you should ideally make a “pro” and “con” list on the scratch paper. Start thinking of reasons for both agreeing with and disagreeing with the given issue. Once you have enough reasons to pick a side, you can move further. You should think about how your personal experiences relate to the issue at hand. Think about things you have observed or experienced in daily life, read about in magazines or newspapers, or even heard about from your family members and friends.

Next, you should be coming up with some examples of your own, that support or illustrate your point of view. Good supporting examples can be the difference between a score of 4.0 and 6.0, so it is worth spending a little time trying to generate them. Don’t spend more than two or three minutes on this part because you can still write a good essay without perfect examples.

Step 3: Pick a Thesis

After you have some reasons and examples for side that you have chosen to go with, you will have to pick a proper thesis based on which you will write your opinion. This is because you don’t have to actually believe the position you write about; sometimes, you may disagree with the issue at hand, but find it easier to come up with examples and reasons for the other side of the argument. So, you need to decide which thesis you are comfortable writing about. Don’t mull over it for minutes together. Just choose whichever thesis allows you to write the strongest essay. In most cases, you find the “con” side easier to argue. You can find a lot of examples that way. And that is completely fine.

Now your thesis needs to state why you believe this position is correct. Take a moment to think about this, and jot your thesis down on your scratch paper. Now you are ready to outline you essay.

Step 4: Outline Your Essay

Don’t start writing your essay altogether. Instead, outline your essay in the direction you want to take. Figure out what you want to write in the introduction, how you want to start off, and how you want to end the conclusion. Then, figure out what you want to write in the body paragraphs. More importantly, you will have to consider how to introduce the opposing side of the argument and how counter it with your point of view. Mentioning the other side of the coin makes the graders think that you are mature enough to have considered the various perspectives on the issue, without going ahead blindly based on intuition.

Step 5: Write Your Response

If you have finished all the previous steps properly and as planned, then this is by far the easiest step of all. All you need to do is write your response in a proper order, something that looks like this:

• Introduction – hook the reader with an amazing intro and state your most important thesis
• Agreeing to the given issue
• Bringing up the negative side of the issue along with supporting facts and quotes
• Building up the negative side further with examples and support

This is the most basic essay outline, and the most famous out there. But you can also follow an unconventional structure and still write a great essay. Some of the other structures that you can follow are:

• Introduction
• First argument for the side you take
• Refute your first take and argue for the opposite side
• Second argument for the side you take
• Refute your take again and argue for the opposite side

This structure allows you to take a neutral step, and hence interweave the arguments for both sides, just like in a debate.

Another structure that can be used in many situations is:

• Argument for your side
• Argument against your side
• Conclusion: evaluate both sides and arrive at thesis

This structure is probably the hardest of all, but has the advantage of being new and uncommon. Graders will definitely appreciate a new structure once in a while, and tend to reward essays that move beyond the norm.

But, the point is, the writing part of the essay should really be the easiest part. Most people who think they have trouble writing actually don’t have difficulty with writing, but they have trouble figuring out what exactly they are trying to say. So if you’ve completed the previous steps, you should know more or less what it is that you want to say about the topic.

Step 6: Proofread

Proofreading is another step that is often neglected, mainly because test takers don’t have the time to. They think they cannot afford to waste one or two minutes proofreading the essay, while they can use the same time to write an additional sentence or two. But as a matter of fact, a perfect 400 word essay gets a higher score than an imperfect 450 word essay. So, you should rather focus on improving what you have already written, and try to spend at least three to four minutes on proofreading what you have written.

Since you don’t have a spell checker on the AWA, you don’t know if you misspelled any word in a hurry. So, be sure to check every single word, and try to refine your essay as much as you can, before the time runs out. Make sure you have all the necessary parts of your essay and the examples you meant to use. Doing these things will clean up the overall appearance of your essay and can only positively affect your score.

AWA Argument Essay

While the Analysis of an Issue task measures your ability to create your own argument, the Analysis of an Argument essay measures your ability to evaluate someone else’s argument. In the words of the test writers, the argument essay tests “your ability to formulate an appropriate and constructive critique of a specific conclusion based upon a specific line of thinking.”

There are two key points in these directions; “evaluate the argument,” and most importantly (it’s so important the directions place it in italics), “do not present your own views on the subject!” Some test takers end up basically writing an analysis of an issue essay when they are supposed to be writing an analysis of an argument essay. Your job here is simply to evaluate and critique the argument presented, not offer your own position on the subject. If you do not answer the question appropriately, you can say goodbye to a good score.

The steps for the Analysis of an Argument essay are somewhat similar to the steps for Analysis of an Issue:

Step 1: Evaluate the Argument

The Analysis of an Argument task presents you with a passage exactly like the passages found on Critical Reasoning questions. Your first task is to break the argument down into its conclusion and premises. Once you have the conclusion and the premises, the next step is to find the assumptions underlying the argument.

Step 2: Brainstorm Assumptions

These arguments are usually full of holes, even more so than Critical Reasoning arguments. You should be able to find two or three major assumptions necessary to make the conclusion work. Look for the common argument patterns: causal, sampling, and analogy. Of course, there may be a lot of assumptions spread around the entire argument, but you only need two or three good assumptions to construct your essay. Now that you have the major assumptions, you can plan the general format of your essay.

Picking a thesis on the argument section is rather easy and involves just one step. Just assume that whatever assumptions that the author has made have no evidences, and go completely negative on that, and prepare a thesis in your mind in that direction.

Once you have laid out the assumptions of the argument, you need to evaluate the strength of these assumptions. Since your task is to evaluate and critique the logic of the argument, you must consider how viable these assumptions are. Generally, the arguments on the GRE are poorly reasoned, so you should basically be looking for reasons the assumptions fail to lead to the conclusion. Think about ways you could weaken and strengthen the argument. A typical essay plan looks like this:

• Introduction: Describe the premise and point out the flaws or state your intention
• Detail first assumption; explain problems with it and how to weaken/strengthen the argument
• Repeat for second assumption
• Repeat for third assumption
• Conclusion: Give final evaluation of the validity of the argument

This is the most basic format for the argument essay, but feel free to make changes as and when you need. You may also use one of the following structures that are less commonly used.

• Introduction: Describe the premises, conclusion, and assumptions of the argument
• Weaken the argument by attacking the assumptions
• Strengthen the argument by bolstering the assumptions
• Conclusion: Present final evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the argument

Another variation goes right to the assumptions in the argument:

• Detail first assumption; explain problems with it and how to weaken/strengthen the argument.
• Repeat the same for second assumption.
• Repeat the same for third assumption.
• Conclusion: Evaluate the strength of the argument based on the assumptions.

Step 5: Write

The writing process on the argument essay is in some ways a little easier than that of the issue essay. Because the focus of this essay is the logic of the argument, there is no need for creative prose. Instead, you are merely presenting the flaws of the given argument in an objective fashion. Your delivery on the argument essay can be straightforward and simple and you can still get a great score, provided your analysis is sound. Following is what each paragraph needs to contain.

Introduction Paragraph

Your introduction paragraph needs to lay out the basic parts of the argument and let the reader know what the purpose of the essay is. Your introduction should have these elements:

• A statement of the conclusion
• A statement of the premises
• A statement of the essay’s purpose

Body Paragraphs

The body paragraphs of an argument essay should describe the assumptions necessary to the argument and then critique them. A good critique should reveal the weaknesses of the assumptions and also show how the argument could be strengthened. Argument essays do not require specific examples and in many cases, specific examples would be inappropriate. Focus instead on dissecting the logic of the given argument. A body paragraph should have the following components:

• A description of an assumption
• An explanation of the weaknesses of the assumption
• An evaluation of the conclusion in light of the assumption

Conclusion Paragraph

The conclusion paragraph of an argument essay doesn’t need to do much, but as with the issue essay, you need to have one. All you have to do is make a final evaluation of the soundness of the argument.

Before you leave your essay, spend one or two minutes proofreading your essay. Make sure you have all the necessary parts of your essay and that your essay is free from grammatical and spelling errors. Correct any typographical errors. Doing these things will clean up the overall appearance of your essay and can only positively affect your score.

Examples and Analyses of Perfect 6.0 AWA Essays

Now that you know how exactly you should structure your AWA essays, it is time to understand what a perfect essay looks like. In this chapter, we will discuss a couple of examples for perfect 6.0 Argument and Issue essays, and we will also analyze the reasons these essays deserve a perfect score. This will give you a basic idea of the various key aspects of the AWA essays that you should include while writing. These essays have been taken from the ETS Essay Pool itself.

Example and Analysis of a Perfect 6.0 Issue Essay

“When someone achieves greatness in any field such as the arts, science, politics, or business that person’s achievements are more important than any of his or her personal faults.”

When individuals attain greatness, their achievements are more important than their personal faults. While historians should not whitewash the personal foibles of great individuals, the impact that these mortals have had in their fields should tower over any personality defects. To focus on the personal weaknesses of great individuals is to miss the importance of their achievements.

The course of human history is decorated with individuals able to rise above their peers and reach the zenith in their fields. These individuals are often the subject of intense scrutiny from contemporaneous skeptics and later historians. But no one can lead an exemplary private life all the time; no human being is able to withstand such surveillance and historical scrutiny without personal faults coming to light. Great individuals are no exception. However, it is misguided to focus on their personal faults rather than their achievements. To do so is to miss the importance of their work, without which our culture would be worse off.

For example, Abraham Lincoln was arguably one of the greatest Presidents the United States has ever had. He managed to bring the country through a substantial revolution and to end slavery despite powerful economic and social forces working against him day and night. However, Lincoln was not a saint. He was moody and prone to depressive funks that disrupted his family life and slowly eroded his marriage. These personal faults did not reduce his success as a President. While we do not have to ignore questions about whether he was a depressive, we also should not consider them an important part of his political heritage. In contrast, many people criticize Lincoln’s decision to suspend the right of habeas corpus. This (presumed) failing is not personal in nature, but relates directly to Lincoln’s work in his field. Criticisms of this sort are entirely relevant, whereas personal criticisms are not.

Another example of a great individual dogged by criticism of his personal conduct is Albert Einstein. Einstein developed a number of the most important theories in modern physics, including an explanation of the photoelectric effect, an explanation of Brownian motion, special and general relativity, and Bose-Einstein quantum statistics. Each one of these theories would have been considered a great life’s work for a scientist; for one man to contribute this much is remarkable. However, Einstein also had life-long problems with infidelity. The fact that he cheated on his wife is in no way relevant to his accomplishments in the field of physics, and indeed most references to Einstein properly ignore it. To focus attention on the faults of his personal life is to obscure the impact he made on history.

Great individuals have personal faults, as all human beings do. Yet it is incorrect to assert that these faults detract from those individuals’ accomplishments. We are better able to appreciate the gravity of great accomplishments when we are not burying our heads in the sand, in search of personal failings.

Explanation:

The essay above deserves a perfect score, because it takes all the 7 major elements that graders look for, as we have already discussed in chapter 3: Clarity, Structure, Sentence Variety, Vocabulary, Grammar, Evidence, and Reasoning.

The thesis provided by the student is very clear and concise. There is no confusion about which side the student took. The issue essay tests how well we can present a position on an issue effectively and persuasively, and this essay passes both the tests.

The piece is also very well organized. The most popularly used structure “intro-body-body-body-conclusion” really works well for this type of an issue, and the student made good use of it. While the response included only two examples as opposed to the suggested three, the two examples presented are extremely strong. President Lincoln is an ideal case study of a leader whose greatness should be not be obscured by his domestic problems. The same can be said with Einstein; his infidelities may have wounded his family emotionally, but his contribution to modern science and technology will be remembered throughout the history of mankind. So, obviously, two of the most historic and the most apt examples were presented by the student here.

Additionally, the conclusion is substantial and does an excellent job of summing up the essay. The student uses a variety of sentences in order to make the conclusion unique, and not sounding too much like the introduction itself. He/She does a great job of restating the introduction paragraph without sounding overly redundant. Lastly, this essay is extremely well-written, and shows the student’s grasp over written English language. The grammar and syntax are almost flawless, and it is hard to write a better essay response to this issue, in under 30 minutes.

These are the reasons why this essay deserves a straight 6.0 score.

Example and Analysis of a Perfect 6.0 Argument Essay

The following appeared in the editorial section of a national news magazine:

“The rating system for electronic games is similar to the movie rating system in that it provides consumers with a quick reference so that they can determine if the subject matter and contents are appropriate. This electronic game rating system is not working because it is self-regulated and the fines for violating the rating system are nominal. As a result an independent body should oversee the game industry and companies that knowingly violate the rating system should be prohibited from releasing a game for two years.”

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. Point out flaws in the argument’s logic and analyze the argument’s underlying assumptions. In addition, evaluate how supporting evidence is used and what evidence might counter the argument’s conclusion. You may also discuss what additional evidence could be used to strengthen the argument or what changes would make the argument more logically sound.

The argument claims that the electronic games rating system, although similar to the movie rating system, is not working because it is self-regulated and violation fines are nominal; Hence, the gaming rating system should be overseen by an independent body. Stated in this way the argument fails to mention several key factors, on the basis of which it could be evaluated. The conclusion relies on assumptions, for which there is no clear evidence. Therefore, the argument is rather weak, unconvincing, and has several flaws.

First, the argument readily assumes that because the electronic game rating system is self-regulated, it is not working well. This statement is a stretch and not substantiated in any way. There are numerous examples in other areas of business or commerce, where the entities are self-regulated and rather successful. For instance, FIA, the Formula1 racing organization is self-regulated. Yet, the sport is very popular and successful, drawing millions of spectators around the world each year. Tickets are rather expensive, races are shown on pay-per-view, and nearly all drivers are paid very well.

Another example is the paralleled movie rating system that the argument mentions. The author fails to clarify whether it is working well, but it is clear that the movie rating system is pretty well received by people, who often base their decisions to go see a movie with kids or not on the movie rating. It has never been a case when someone would feel cheated by the movie rating and express disappointment afterwards. Since the movie rating system is also self-regulated, it follows that this regulatory method is working pretty well and it is not obvious how it can be the reason for the poor electronic game rating system. The argument would have been much clearer if it explicitly gave examples of how the self-regulatory system led to bad ratings and customer dissatisfaction.

Second, the argument claims that any violation fees for bad electronic game ratings are nominal. It thus suggests that this is yet another reason for the rating system not working. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between the monetary amount of the fines and the quality of the electronic game rating system. In fact, the argument does not even draw a parallel with the mentioned movie rating system and its violation fines. If any such correlation had been shown for the movie rating system, which supposedly works well, then the author would have sounded a bit more convincing. In addition, if the argument provided evidence that low violation fines lead to electronic game manufacturers to ignore any regulations with respect to the game rating system, the argument could have been strengthened even further.

Finally, the argument concludes that an independent body should oversee the game industry and companies that violate the rating system, should be punished. From this statement again, it is not at all clear how an independent regulatory body can do a better job than a self-regulated one. Without supporting evidence and examples from other businesses where independent regulatory bodies have done a great job, one is left with the impression that the claim is more of a wishful thinking rather than substantive evidence. As a result, this conclusion has no legs to stand on.

In summary, the argument is flawed and therefore unconvincing. It could be considerably strengthened if the author clearly mentioned all the relevant facts. In order to assess the merits of a certain situation, it is essential to have full knowledge of all contributing factors.

The piece is also very well organized. The most popularly used structure “intro-body-body-body-conclusion” really works well for this type of an argument, and the student made good use of it. The response included sufficient examples that are pretty solid, and more than satisfy the student’s take. The examples provided are also real-life in nature, as opposed to many hypothetical examples that students write. This gives this essay response quite an edge.

The student uses a variety of sentences in order to make his/her point strong enough to concur with. He/she does a great job of restating the introduction paragraph without sounding overly redundant. All the paragraphs are very well written, and the structure, writing, and vocabulary used by the student shows the student’s grasp over written English language. The grammar and syntax are almost flawless, and it is hard to write a better essay response to this issue, in under 30 minutes.

6 Types of False Reasoning You Should Avoid on the Argument Essay

In order to confuse test takers, the AWA essays will always contain some flawed reasoning or illogical statements. In particular, some of the paragraphs on the AWA Argument essay will contain flawed reasoning, which can appear in many forms. While these forms can potentially be unlimited in number, most of them can be categorized into 6 groups. These are potentially the 6 types of false reasoning that you frequently see on the AWA Argument essays:

• Creating stereotypes. Assuming that characteristics of a group in general apply to each member of that group.
• Assuming that a certain condition is necessary for a certain outcome
• Drawing a weak analogy between two things
• Confusing a cause-effect relationship with a correlation (famously known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e. correlation does not imply causation)
• Relying on inappropriate or potentially unrepresentative statistics
• Relying on biased or tainted data (methods for collecting data must be unbiased and the poll responses must be credible)

Almost all of the argument essays contain more than one of the following flaws, so it is important that you are aware of each and every possible flawed reasoning.

1. The Stereotypical Assumption

We see this happen quite often in our everyday life. People resort to creating stereotypes of a particular person, or a group of people. However, common sense says that it is pretty unrealistic to describe a group and then expect that every single member fulfills the very same characteristics.

For example, saying that ‘Girls are weaker than guys’ or that ‘Asians are geniuses’ is just plain wrong, because in both the cases, the statements are generalized in nature. While both the statements can seem to be true for the most part, we all know that in the real world, some girls are stronger than guys, and that some Asians fail their tests. Which means, one cannot simply make a sweeping statement in either of the aforementioned cases.

Now, you can easily remember this type of false reasoning on the AWA, by relating it to stereotypes. We generally think of stereotypes as harmful because they unfairly limit a certain group to a predefined characteristic that often has little to no evidence. Hence, in order to avoid falling trap to this stereotypical assumption fallacy, you should immediately consider any sentence that generalizes a particular group as plain wrong, and attack that assumption when you are writing your response.

2. The Necessity Assumption:

This is a very frequent type of false reasoning that hides in plain sight. Most students simply cannot identify that this type of reasoning is wrong. The author of an argument usually assumes that a certain condition is necessary to achieve the desired result. This sounds reasonable, but the problem here is, the author simply says that it is necessary to do something to achieve something, and does not provide the necessary evidence which proves that there is no other means of achieving a similar result.

For example, the arguments says that, if students have to perform better in schools, it is necessary that the teachers be more active in the classroom.

Now, this looks like a perfectly logical statement to anyone. But the problem is, the author has not considered whether there are any other ways students can perform better in schools. The author makes a simple statement that outlines only one necessity – the teachers being active – and does not talk about the relevant evidences, or the possibility of other ways to achieve the same result. Of course, there are other factors involved: maybe students can perform better if they study every day at home, or if the school redesigns the curriculum to suit the needs of students, etc. So, you should keep in mind to attack this necessity assumption, and also to include the alternative factors or possibilities.

3. The Illogical Analogy:

Analogy is when someone comes to a conclusion about something on the basis of another thing. For example, if a giant conglomerate has doubled its sales in the last one year because it had spent over $10 million on advertising, then in order for another giant conglomerate to double its sales, it has to spend more than $10 million on advertising.

Now, on the first glance, this might seem like a logical argument. But, if you think about it carefully, it is an illogical analogy that the author has made in order to prove his/her point. The argument may seem sound enough to agree to, but one simply can’t analogize these two scenarios, even though the size of the companies is similar.

First of all, we don’t know if the two companies are based in the same country or not. The demographics in their respective countries may respond to different incentives. And there are several other factors like industry, market size, product quality, support system, target audience, consumer trends, economic situation in the country, etc., that need to be addressed, before the author can make such a comparison. Without this thorough background info, one simply can’t make this analogy, and test takers should hence not fall into such traps.

4. The Correlation – Causation Confusion:

As confusing and bemusing as the title is, this is one of the more frequent fallacies that appear on the AWA argument essays. More famously known as the post hoc fallacy, this is easily one of the most common types of false reasoning you’ll encounter on test day. So it is very important that you master it.

Many arguments try to confuse test takers by arguing that correlation and causation are one and the same. But in fact, they aren’t. There is actually a world of difference between them both. While correlation just means that two events have occurred simultaneously, causation means that one event is the result of another event. Now you understand how different these two are. To illustrate further, let us take this as an example: In the year 2000, Company X released their new computer called Series 5, and that same year, the US witnessed a huge economic recession. Again in 2008, the company released its second computer called Series 6, and the US had undergone another economic recession. So, whenever this company releases a new computer, the economy goes down.

Do you see how illogical it sounds? That is the difference between correlation and causation. The above example shows correlation, and not causation. So, one should be careful enough to understand that just because one event happens after another, it doesn’t mean that the first event caused the other to occur.

5. The Statistical Irrelevance:

You will often find that the AWA arguments cite statistical evidence to support their claims. Now, while we appreciate any kind of statistical data that further bolsters the author’s point of view, we must also be careful to analyze the relevance of the statistical data in a particular scenario.

Sometimes, the argument may cite a statistic according to a survey where a small group of people were asked a question, and based on their views, the author generalized the opinion of the people of the entire city/state/country. For example, if a survey of 1000 people in New York City say that they really need a new park in the city, does it mean that the entire population of the city feel the same? In order to draw a conclusion about anything, a larger sample is required. In order to really identify the voice of the people, the survey should at least include a majority of people in the city. If the population of New York City is 10 million, then the survey should try to include the opinions of at least half that number.

Hence, test takers should keep an eye on statistics mentioned in the arguments made by the author, and try to validate the relevance or significance of the given statistical data.

6. The Data Bias:

Sometimes, even though surveys include a large number of people or a certainly large sample space, it is not enough to conclude that the results obtained from the survey are really true. Biased data is another reason why data can be manipulated with, or tainted easily. For any survey or data to be considered legitimate it has to be collected in an unbiased, fair, and scientific manner.

For example, if a survey was conducted among children in a city, on the question “What is your favorite color?” and the children were given only two options, Blue and Red, one cannot conclude that Red is the most favorite color for the children in the city, even though 83% of the children chose Red. The survey clearly does not ask an open ended question, and is biased towards either Red, or Blue, or both. The survey is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to yield certain desired responses, and this definitely manipulates responses by providing narrow options.

Hence, test takers should question the statistical legitimacy of a survey, and question the author whether the survey or data obtained is scientific and unbiased or not.

Checklist for Argument Essay Task:

Here is a checklist you should use when you practice writing argument essays. Ask yourself these questions to identify the flaws in the given argument.

• Are the facts stated in the argument real or are they just preposterous exaggerations? (Hint: you can always question the source of the information provided in the argument)
• If the argument draws conclusions from any sample statistical data, then is the connection between the data and the conclusion strong?
• Is the sample data taken from the group similar to the other group for which the conclusions were made?
• Is the sample data significant enough?
• Is the provided sample data inconclusive or invalid? Did it exclude other important factors?
• Are the statements mentioned in the argument from an authority on the subject or from individuals trying to voice their concerns/opinions?
• Do you have any real world examples that invalidate the conclusion? (examples from your personal experiences, from articles you read before, from the news or from historical incidents)

Is there anything missing in the argument? Maybe there is really something that should have been mentioned to make the argument more concrete.

How to Finish an Essay in 20 Minutes: 9 Effective Strategies to Save Time on the AWA Section

When it comes to acing any section on the GRE, it all boils down to mastering one key factor – time. Time is the only reason why 99% of the test takers cannot get a perfect score on the GRE, let alone on the AWA. But then, just as pretty much with everything related to the GRE, we at CrunchPrep have cracked the code in order to finish off a brilliantly written essay in under 20 minutes. That’s right, 20 minutes only.

Just as with other sections on the GRE, there are a few time saving strategies that you can adopt on test day, if you want to finish off the AWA section quickly, and still score a perfect 6.0. Here are the 9 most effective time saving strategies that you should implement on test day.

1. Finish off Introduction and Conclusion First

This is an amazing technique that not only saves time for you, but also relieves you of the pressure of writing something in reply. All you have to do is, as soon as you are ready to pen down your response, finish off writing the introduction and the conclusion paragraphs first. Don’t bother touching the other paragraphs yet.

Now you may wonder, how on earth one can write the conclusion part without ever concluding the essay in the first place. Simple. As we have already discussed in the previous chapters, you first outline your essay before you start writing it. So, by the time you are about to start penning down your response, you will have already figured out what you want to write in the introduction, how you want to start off, and how you want to end the conclusion. So, it becomes rather easy for you to get started.

Finish these two very important paragraphs as early as you can, preferably in the first 5 minutes. Now, if you can do this well, you only have three more paragraphs to write, and you have over 20 minutes of time left. You can easily write each paragraph in 5 minutes, and the entire essay will be finished before you know it.

2. Always Be Negative

Even though we asked you to pick a thesis in the previous chapters, you should know that if you want to save time, you will have to try and stay on the negative side. This applies to both the Issue and the Argument essays. If you are wondering why, you should understand how the human brain works when analyzing a controversy. It takes no time for us to point out mistakes in others, while it takes a lot of thinking and courage to appreciate something that is controversial, because our brains are evolutionarily hardwired to stay away from something foreign, in order to protect us. And given the incredibly limited time that you have on your hands, it will be easier for you to criticize the author’s point of view, than to take his/her side.

So, let us go with some prejudice here. Before you even start reading the essay question, you should be in a negative state of mind, and be ready to counter the given essay with lots of criticism. You should believe that whatever the author has written is false, no matter how logical it may seem. This sort of thinking will help you brainstorm the relevant points quickly.

3. Attack the Assumptions

In both the Issue and the Argument essay questions, the author will have made multiple assumptions in order to come to a particular conclusion. It is your job now to attack the very assumption that the author makes. There is no point in attacking mere facts, because we never know if the facts are true or false. Which means, you cannot simply claim that the facts presented are wrong.  But you can always say that the assumption is wrong. So, as soon as you start reading the essay question, figure out where the author has made assumptions, and think about how you can attack them.

4. Don’t Be A Perfectionist

This is a big problem among students today, especially those who really want to get a perfect 6.0 score. Wanting a 6.0 score is okay, but the problem is, these students try to be perfectionists about everything they write. They try to make sure every little thing about their essay response is perfect. Now, while this is a good practice in normal life, you should remember that this will hit you badly on test day. You cannot simply make sure everything you write is perfect, especially when the clock is running after you, and when you are totally stressed out.

A better strategy is to keep writing even though you make mistakes, as once you think you are done with the writing part, then you can start proofreading your copy for mistakes and small errors.

5. Use the Scratch Paper

One of the biggest sins that GRE test takers commit, is that they don’t use the scratch paper to its fullest. Don’t be under the impression that the scratch paper is given only to help you solve quant problems. The scratch paper can be used effectively to score higher on the AWA section too. Use the scratch paper to pen down your thoughts as you are reading the given topic, and also make use of it to outline your essay, and to devise a proper answering strategy.

If you need more details, on how to use the scratch paper on the GRE , we have done a separate post on that. Check out more scratch paper tips and strategies here .

6. Practice Typing

If there is one thing that can help you write a 500-600 word essay in under 20 minutes, it is the ability to type fast. Considering the fact that you will take about 2-3 minutes to read and understand the given question, another 2-3 minutes to figure out what you want to write, and another couple of minutes to outline your essay, you will be left with roughly 20 minutes to write a 600 word essay. Considering the fact that you should save some time to proofread your essay, you should probably be able to type around 600 words in 15 minutes, which means, 200 words every 5 minutes.

Yes, it is possible to type a couple hundred words in 5 minutes, if you already know what you are going to write. Don’t worry about it. 200 words in 5 minutes equals 40 words per minute, which is exactly the global average for typing speed. But still, if you think you can’t type that fast, start practicing today. There are some fantastic free resources like Keybr and TypingWeb available online, that help you learn fast typing.

7. Practice Keyboard Shortcuts

Learning keyboard shortcuts can be really helpful on test day. The word processor on the GRE is quite basic in nature. You’ll have basic keyboard functions, plus three other features: cut, copy, paste, and undo. And that’s all. No other shortcuts or spell checks or other advanced features like bold and underline. Now, these functions work exactly as they do on your computer. You can cut text from a portion of your essay and paste it in at a different point. Or you can use undo (Ctrl + Z) to delete your previous typing. Use these features and reduce the time you spend on editing your essay.

8. Practice! Practice! Practice!

As straightforward as it gets. Just as with the other sections on the GRE, the more you practice writing long essays at home, the higher you score on test day. But there is a catch here: you should practice typing essays on a computer keyboard. This is rather important, because most of us today use laptops and tablet phones to communicate, and the keyboards we normally use differ greatly from those of the desktop computers. You will have to type on a desktop computer keyboard on test day, and it is recommended that you get used to the new keyboard at home itself.

9. Read The Entire AWA Question Pool

We generally don’t recommend this to every student, since most of them don’t have the time to. But if your test is months away from now, it will do you a world of good if you can go through each and every AWA question from the ETS Essay Pool. There are separate question pools for Issue Essays and Argument Essays , and they are not too many in number. You could probably finish them all in a month or two.

Remember that the AWA questions you will see on test day will be from these essay pools only . So, it won’t hurt to check them all out.

Top 101 Transitional Words and Phrases You Should Use to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section

The difference between a normal essay and a great essay, is the way it is written. Normal essays are lifeless, and they bore readers a few lines into the story. But on the other hand, great essays meticulously use persuasive language, and gain the reader’s attention. In addition to writing compelling reasons and connecting stories, you should also include powerful vocabulary, if you want to get a perfect score. Since a lot of students who take the GRE are non-native speakers, they will not be able to naturally write essays that sound truly professional.

So, here are some of the words and phrases you should be using when you write your AWA essays. You might have seen these words countless times in books, newspapers, or magazines. But it is time for you to include them in your writings, and make your essays sound professional.

Supporting words – for instance, for example, to illustrate, to demonstrate, such as, particularly, specifically, notably

Additional support – moreover, furthermore, in addition, similarly, in the same way, with respect to, as well as

Putting same idea in a different way – in other words, to put it simply, in view of this, with this in mind, to put it differently, that is to say

Opposing words – by contrast, on the other hand, in comparison, on the contrary, instead, though, while, despite, although

Consequential words – as a result, accordingly, thereupon, thence, thus, because, for this reason, in effect

Time indicating words – immediately, formerly, currently, meanwhile, eventually, first, second, finally, previously, henceforth, in due time, subsequently

Certainty words – without doubt, most importantly, indubitably, undoubtedly, needless to say

Comparison words – in comparison, however, likewise, even so, nevertheless, nonetheless, all the same

Positive words – magnificent, grandeur, magnanimous, phenomenal, marvelous, prodigious, formidable, notable, glorious, wonderful, paramount, sublime, flamboyant

Negative words – unfounded, doubtful, questionable, oversimplified, problematic, unconvincing, unacceptable, biased, unreliable, defective, presumptuous, vague, unwarranted, weak

Against the point of view words – one cannot deny that, to be fair, it could be argued that, granted, admittedly, a stark contrast, as contrasted with, on second thoughts

Concluding words – in summary, consequently, hence, in closing, in conclusion, therefore, ultimately, to summarize, on the whole, for the aforementioned reasons

Ultimately, it is the content of the essay that really matters. If you are able to write an astounding essay, you really don’t need any advanced words or phrases. But since it is a herculean task for many students, especially the non-native students, to write a perfectly professional essay in under 30 minutes, it would definitely help if some of these words are included.

But at the same time, students should be careful enough to not simply scatter these words across the essay as they please. These words and phrases should really fit in the context of the essay, and the sentences must smoothly integrate into one another. Hence, refrain from using these words and phrases improperly, and learn when and where to use them in your AWA essay.

27 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Writing Your AWA Essays

Until now, we have discussed numerous techniques and strategies to score a perfect 6.0 on the AWA section. But, we think it would be beneficial if you have all the probable mistakes at one place, so you can safely avoid them all at once. Here are the 27 mistakes that you should strictly avoid while writing your AWA essays. Now, some of these points may sound repetitive since we have already discussed a lot up until now, but think of this as a checklist that can help you figure out the danger zones and possible pitfalls.

1. Writing a cliché ridden essay

While using cliché phrases and sentences may seem like an idea choice for anyone writing an essay, it would more often than not be detrimental to someone writing the GRE. Understanding the fact that hundreds of thousands of students write the same essays every year, you should try and be a bit different, a bit unique. Using the same examples that everyone uses really won’t help you much, because it only looks like you have lifted those lines from someone else’s passage or an online journal. So, try to use your own examples, and your own sentences while writing the AWA essays.

2. Not citing the original author

Sometimes, it would really help if you can use a killer essay quote or two, in your AWA essays. But it is important to remember that you should cite the original author, lest there is chance that you might come off as pretentious. Whenever you are quoting someone’s lines, it is customary to give them the credit. Doing this will not only reinforce your image as a trustworthy individual, but also gives the grader an impression that you are an intellectual person. After all, only uber-smart people can remember great quotes along with their authors’ names.

3. Writing mixed-up paragraphs

If you remember what we discussed about writing and organization in the previous chapters, you should recollect the fact that you must allocate separate paragraphs for every idea or point that you are writing about. Often times, test takers tend to stuff a paragraph with two or three ideas, and end up mixing it up pretty badly. This can often cause confusion, not only to the grader, but also to you. Discussing more than one point in a single paragraph is not at all recommended. Dumping all ideas into a single paragraph is a very bad idea, and shows poor organization. So, make it a point to not mix up paragraphs.

4. Giving away too much in the intro

The most important aspect about writing an article or an essay is to avoid giving away too much information in the very beginning itself. Don’t believe us? Ask any content marketer. The key to writing exceptional essays is to keep the reader intrigued until the last word. This is one of the reasons why we hate our textbooks but love fiction novels: the latter simply keep you interested until the end. So, you might want to implement the same strategy when writing your essays. Do not give away too many key points, or at least your main idea, in the first paragraph itself. There are separate paragraph for that.

5. Using irrelevant examples

Just as we already discussed multiple times throughout this guide, avoid using irrelevant examples as much as you can. Sometimes it is fine to make up your own examples, but remember that they should be very relevant to the rest of the essay. So, as much as you can, try and come up with strong and concrete examples to support your point of view.

6. Not summarizing effectively

One of the more overlooked mistakes in writing is that many test takers tend to not summarize their essays properly. A perfect conclusion paragraph not only includes the main idea or point of view that you chose to side with, but also has a neat summary of all the points that have already been discussed in the previous paragraphs. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to write them all over again, but a quick conclusive line about each paragraph would do you a world of good.

7. Introducing new points in the conclusion

Yes, this happens quite often, and is one of the major reasons why many are not getting close to that perfect AWA score. Sometimes, you finish off writing the entire body of the essay, and move on to the conclusion paragraph. As you are writing it, you are struck with a new point or an idea that you think should be on the essay at all costs. So, what do you do? You somehow try to fit that point somewhere in the conclusion paragraph, and you think it will add to your existing robust set of points. But guess what? You haven’t backed it up properly anywhere in the essay, and hence the entire point sounds irrelevant or insufficient at that point of time. So, avoid introducing new ideas or points in the last paragraph. Be content with what you have already written.

8. Writing immediately

If you have read the previous chapters thoroughly, you would understand that there is a step by step process that you need to follow in order to get closer to the 6.0 score. But, a majority of the students give in to the temporal pressure, and start off writing as soon as they read the question. This will only lead to chaos in the next few minutes, as you will find your head clogged with ideas. So, give it a minute or two, and think about what you are going to write, before you start typing.

9. Not ideating correctly

A poorly presented idea is as good as an idea not presented at all. Whatever point it is that you are trying to make, you should make it correctly. An improper presentation, or a poorly organized idea will only make your essay sound more amateur that anything else.

10. Taking too much time for ideation

As straightforward as it can it, time is the most valuable resource on the GRE. Taking too much time just to gather ideas is not at all good for your score. Almost all the essays you will see on the GRE are quite simple to criticize, and anyone with decent practice can crack the code easily. So, in order to avoid wasting too much time trying to ideate, you should do a bit of practice at home.

11. Not sticking to one side

We’ve already said it out: Go negative! There is no way an average GRE test taker can write a perfectly balanced essay response in under 30 minutes, which is why most of them tend to sway towards a particular side. You should follow suit, if you want to score higher on the AWA section. Not sticking to any one of the sides shows that you are too afraid to stand your ground, or that you are too confused to pick a side. Neither of this is a good image for you, so always pick a side no matter what.

12. Not using templates/structure

There are a few basic structures for writing the AWA, and adopting them would be a good idea, since you don’t have to reinvent the wheel all over again. We have already done most of the hard work for you, and provided some basic structures and templates that you can easily follow. If you can’t make good use of them, at least try to create your own organization or structure. Otherwise, your essay response ends up being too clumsy to understand.

13. Not being specific enough

Whichever side you choose to take, or whatever point you are trying to make, be specific. Never try to beat around the bush and expect to get away with. You are not a politician. Never use vague statements that only lead the grader to more confusion.  Be very specific about your opinions, and have a clear idea of what exactly you are going to write, even if it might sound a bit negative, or a bit harsh on the author.

14. Using complex words just for the sake of using

To paraphrase Maya Angelou’s epic quote, ‘You should use a word only if you know what it exactly means.’ Keep this in mind at all times. Do not use a word just for the sake of using, and end up sounding like a novice writer who is trying to impress people he doesn’t know. Instead, use nice little words that sound simple and professional enough to get you a good score.

15. Not using transitional words

Your essay should read like a story. Every paragraph that you write should have a smooth beginning and a smooth ending, thus making the entire essay readable. This can only happen when you use transitional words and phrases that are like bridges linking one paragraph with another. Not using transitional words can make your prompt sound abrupt and hence, not perfect.

16. Not sounding confident enough

Whether it is an Issue essay or an Argument essay, you are asked to give your opinion. Which means, you are entitled to write whatever it is that you have in mind. Nobody is going to argue, or disagree with you, so there is no need to get defensive at all. Using words such as ‘I think’, ‘in my opinion’, ‘perhaps’, ‘Maybe’, etc., will give the reader the impression that you are not confident enough to put your ideas forth. So, be more confident, and more authoritative when you are writing your opinions. Write like an expert editor of a newspaper, not like a newly recruited intern.

17. Using the word ‘I’ very often

While it is perfectly alright to sound like an expert, it is not alright to sound narcissistic and repetitive. A lot of students use the word ‘I’ way too often that it puts the reader off. Yes, everybody already knows that it is you who wrote the essay and that all the ideas presented in the essay are yours. There is no point in saying ‘I think this’, or ‘I would do that’ etc. A few times is fine, but too many times isn’t welcome at all.

18. Using the same sentence structure over and over again

If you remember what we said earlier, sentence variety is as important as anything else. Using monotonous sentence structures or repetitive phrases throughout the essay is a pretty bad idea, since it tells the reader that you, as a writer, lack variety, or creativity. So, try to rephrase the same sentences and write something else that means the same. Like many other things in life, this comes with a lot of practice.

19. Not including a counter argument

Agreeing with the author to some extent will give the grader a great impression about you as a writer, but if you keep on agreeing with the author’s points of view, without including any new information from your side, you will surely come off as someone without any knowledge about the given subject. Given the fact that almost all essays come from a wide range of topics, and that they don’t need any special prior knowledge, it would be bad if you cannot counter the author’s deliberately wrong point of view along with your two cents.

20. Contradicting yourself

With so many arguments and counter arguments clogged inside your mind, and with the speeding clock on the screen, it is possible that you somehow contradict your own argument. Sometimes, when writing the third or the fourth paragraphs, test takers contradict their own opinions or points of view that they put forward in the first one or two paragraphs. This clearly shows that you get confused easily. So, don’t contradict your own statements, and always read what you have written.

21. Letting writer’s block take over your AWA

Writer’s block is when an author loses the ability to write something new. This has happened to the greatest of writers, and will probably happen to you too, if you don’t practice well enough before the test. If you are someone who is not used to writing a lot, then should start practicing for the AWA, unless you want to end up staring at the screen pondering how to begin the essay.

22. Affecting other sections due to mistakes in AWA

Also you already know, you will face the AWA section first. Don’t let the AWA section set the tone for the rest of the test. Sometimes AWA goes great, and you’ll feel extremely confident (or overconfident) about the remaining sections. Sometimes, you may not do well on the AWA and feel gusted about yourself, which affects the other sections. So, try to stay unaffected by the result. Remember; you are the one who sets the tone, not a couple of essay questions.

23. Focusing a lot on grammar and vocabulary

Even though grammar and vocabulary are really important when it comes to scoring higher on the AWA, you should not overstress their importance. Write whatever you can and as much as you can. Do not bother about silly grammatical errors or workaday vocabulary. Once you think you are done with writing, then go back and read everything, correct those grammatical mistakes, or replace those boring words with good vocabulary. But, do it only once you are done with the essay.

24. Writing unnecessarily long sentences

Mark Twain once said ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.’ That shows how difficult it is to write short and concise sentences. Anybody can write long gibberish in a short time, but it takes lots of practice, time and talent to keep it simple. Now, even though you are not blessed with a lot of time during the GRE test, you should try to minimize your sentences to make them sound smarter. Don’t try to use filler words or phrases so you could increase the word count. Quality trumps quantity any day.

25. Using slang language.

Writing as if you are chatting with a friend is something that happens quite often during exams. Using chat language and shortened forms of words like u, hw, y, etc. is bound to happen, especially if you are not very adept at writing often. If however, you find yourself using these sort of words in your essay, your chances of getting a good AWA score will rapidly decrease. So, it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of practice at home before test day.

26. Attacking the issue task as if it’s an argument

Or vice versa. It is possible to get confused between an issue essay and an argument and test takers often mistake one for the other. This could be the gravest mistake you will ever make on the AWA section, because if you cannot understand whether the given question is an Issue or an Argument task, then you cannot write a proper response at all. So, make sure you don’t get confused between the two essay formats or structures, and that you have a clear understanding of both the question types.

27. Not leaving time for proofreading

Proofreading is often neglected because test takers simply don’t have the time. They think they cannot afford to waste one or two minutes proofreading the essay, while they can use the same time to write an additional sentence or two. But as a matter of fact, a perfect 400 word essay gets a higher score than an imperfect 450 word essay. So, you should rather focus on improving what you have already written, and try to spend at least three to four minutes on proofreading what you have written.

So, this is the most comprehensive list of mistakes that you can avoid on the AWA section of the GRE. With this, we come to the end of this ultimate guide. And if this were any other guide, we would have finished it here. But since this is an advanced guide for the AWA, we would like to give you something special. Something that is exclusive to only you. In our bonus chapter, we would like to give you a bonus: A couple of super-secret templates that you can use, if you want to speed up your AWA preparation.

Bonus Chapter – Mind-Blowing Templates to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section

This bonus chapter includes mind boggling AWA Essay templates that will get you a sure shot 6.0 score. We have created these templates after examining several hundreds of AWA essays and responses from students across the world. This chapter contains both AWA Issue Essay Template and AWA Argument Essay Template separately. Using these templates will get you guaranteed results, and you will see a perfect 6.0 score on your own essays, guaranteed.

NOTE: But wait! Just because we have given you a couple of templates, it doesn’t mean that you just copy the same content during your actual GRE test. Remember, this website gets thousands of visitors every day, and if every single one of you use the same template, very soon, all your AWA scores will be cancelled and your essay response will be held for plagiarism. We definitely don’t want that to happen, do we? So, better be careful.

We strongly advise you to use these templates as frameworks, and use them to create your own templates for both the essay questions. The templates provided here are just for reference, and it will only help you if you create similar templates for yourself, rather than using the ones given here.

Download the AWA essay template right now!

So, that’s about it. We have come to an end of this epic guide to ace the analytical writing section on the GRE. We have discussed about 71 invaluable strategies that you could use to improve your writing skills, and thereby get a perfect score on the AWA section.

This is by far the most comprehensive GRE Analytical Writing guide in the world. It was created to help you ace the Analytical Writing section in the GRE. If you think this is very helpful, or if you really loved it, share it with your friends right now! Our goal is to help as many students as we can. So what are you waiting for? Go share or tweet the living daylights out of this guide!

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What’s a Good GRE Score?

A good GRE score is subjective and depends on which school you will be applying to. Start by finding average GRE scores for the schools you plan to apply to. This will help you understand how important these scores are as part of your application and give you a target to work towards.

If you’ve found yourself needing to get higher GRE scores after taking a practice test , make sure to fully understand how scoring works. Sometimes raising your overall score by just a few points can be very challenging and requires true dedication to reach your target school. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How GRE Scoring Works

How schools use gre scores.

• Good GRE Scores

GRE Scoring Percentiles

How to improve your gre score.

• GRE Practice Questions

In general, here is what you need to know about GRE scores.

• You will receive an overall score on the GRE and scores for each section of the exam.
• Your overall GRE score will be somewhere between 260 – 340.
• The range for scores in the verbal and quantitative sections is 130-170 in one-point increments.
• The range for scores in analytical writing is 0 – 6 in half-point increments.
• The mean GRE scores for each section amongst recent test takers were ~151 in Verbal, ~155 in Quantitative, and ~3.5 in Writing.
• A good GRE score for each section is generally considered 158+ for Verbal, 159+ for Quantitative, and 4.5+ for Writing, and an overall score of 318+ which places you into the 75th percentile or higher. 

You will receive scores for each section of the GRE and also an overall score which gets calculated based on the scores you receive on the quantitative and verbal sections. The Essay (Analytical Writing) section score does not factor into your overall GRE score and is scored separately.

Verbal and Quantitative scores reflect the number of questions you answer correctly and difficulty level. Essay (Analytical Writing) scores reflect the quality of your essay response.

The first Verbal section and the first Quantitative section are both routing modules, so the number of questions you get right in these routing modules determines the difficulty level of your second section in both Verbal and Quant. 

Your second sections could be lower-difficulty, medium-difficulty, or higher-difficulty, and the difficulty level of your second section will in part determine your final score.

[ RELATED: How is the GRE scored? ]

There are only 81 possible overall scores (from 260 to 340) possible on the GRE. That means that answering just a few more questions correctly can push your score from just average to far above average. GRE SCORE EXPERT TIP

Graduate and professional programs use your overall and section GRE scores to assess your readiness for the program you are applying to. GRE scores demonstrate your ability to succeed and give admissions officers one more factor to look at when deciding to admit you or not.

Remember that GRE scores are only one of many factors that are used to determine your readiness. Personal statements, transcripts, letters of recommendation , and sometimes even work experience can all be used to decide on your application. 

If you are applying for a math-heavy program like engineering, you will probably need higher GRE scores in Quantitative than in Verbal. This logic also applies to English degrees where you will probably be expected to have higher Verbal scores than in other degree programs.

[ RELATED: Average GRE scores for top Graduate School Programs ]

GRE Score Ranges: Average, Good, and Highest GRE Scores

  best gre scores.

These GRE scores will put you in the top 10% of all GRE test takers

GRE Verbal Score : 163-170

Gre quantitative score :   165-170, gre writing score : 5.0-6.0,   competitive gre scores.

These GRE scores will put you in a highly competitive place in admissions (top 25% of all GRE test takers)

GRE Verbal Score: 158-170

Gre quantitative score:   165-170, gre writing score: 4.5,   good gre scores.

These GRE scores put you ahead of the pack (50%+), but won’t be as advantageous when applying to highly competitive programs

GRE Verbal Score: 152-158

Gre quantitative score:   157-164, gre writing score: 4.0,   below average gre scores.

These GRE scores may be enough to get into a wide variety of graduate programs, but will be below average compared to the testing population

GRE Verbal Score: 151 or below

Gre quantitative score:   156 or below, gre writing score: 3.5 or below.

Together with your GRE scores, you’ll also receive a percentile rank, which is intended to give you an idea of how well your scores measure up against other GRE test takers. The higher your percentile rank, the more likely you are to get into a top graduate program.

GRE Verbal + Quantitative Scaled Scores and Percentiles

The percentile scores listed below in the verbal and quantitative conversion calculator, rate your performance relative to that of a large sample population of other GRE takers.

As provided by ETS , the creator of the GRE, possible GRE scores and their coinciding percentiles are as follows:

Not sure how you’ll score on the GRE? Take a  free full-length practice test for the GRE® today to see where you stand.

GRE Analytical Writing Score Levels and Percentiles

To improve your GRE score you will need to honestly assess your most recent practice test results to determine how much you need to improve. Remember you’re not aiming for perfection, just for scores that align with historical scores from the degree programs you plan to apply to.

Studying for 3 months is the benchmark for GRE prep . This will give you enough time to seriously focus on your weaknesses and lightly refresh your knowledge of your strengths. It will give you plenty of time to take multiple practice tests and use practice questions to stay sharp. 

Studying for at least 3 months will also give you the ability to pivot if needed and hire a GRE tutor to give you the one-on-one attention you need. 

[ RELATED : GRE 3-Month Study Plan ]

Quiz: Verbal Diagnostic GRE Practice Questions

Quiz: math diagnostic gre practice questions.

Written by Kaplan experts, reviewed by Gordon Spector, GRE Veteran Instructor and Content Developer. Gordon has taught thousands of students how to master the GRE for over 10 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry.

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About the e-rater Scoring Engine

The e-rater automated scoring engine uses AI technology and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to evaluate the writing proficiency of student essays by providing automatic scoring and feedback. The engine provides descriptive feedback on the writer’s grammar, mechanics, word use and complexity, style, organization and more.

Who uses the e-rater engine and why?

Companies and institutions use this patented technology to power their custom applications.

The e-rater engine is used within the  Criterion ®  Online Writing Evaluation Service . Students use the e-rater engine's feedback to evaluate their essay-writing skills and to identify areas that need improvement. Teachers use the Criterion service to help their students develop their writing skills independently and receive automated, constructive feedback. The e-rater engine is also used in other low-stakes practice tests include TOEFL ®  Practice Online and GRE ®  ScoreItNow!™.

In high-stakes settings, the engine is used in conjunction with human ratings for both the Issue and Argument prompts of the GRE test's Analytical Writing section and the TOEFL iBT ®  test's Independent and Integrated Writing prompts. ETS research has shown that combining automated and human essay scoring demonstrates assessment score reliability and measurement benefits.

For more information about the use of the e-rater engine, read  E-rater as a Quality Control on Human Scores (PDF) .

How does the e-rater engine grade essays?

The e-rater engine provides a holistic score for an essay that has been entered into the computer electronically. It also provides real-time diagnostic feedback about grammar, usage, mechanics, style and organization, and development. This feedback is based on NLP research specifically tailored to the analysis of student responses and is detailed in  ETS's research publications (PDF) .

How does the e-rater engine compare to human raters?

The e-rater engine uses NLP to identify features relevant to writing proficiency in training essays and their relationship with human scores. The resulting scoring model, which assigns weights to each observed feature, is stored offline in a database that can then be used to score new essays according to the same formula.

The e-rater engine doesn’t have the ability to read so it can’t evaluate essays the same way that human raters do. However, the features used in e-rater scoring have been developed to be as substantively meaningful as they can be, given the state of the art in NLP. They also have been developed to demonstrate strong reliability — often greater reliability than human raters themselves.

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The GRE can feel like a mysterious black box: your answers go in and a score comes out. But there must be more to it than that, right? Just how is the GRE scored?

As you might have guessed, the process is much more complicated than just adding up the number of questions you got right.  In order to ensure the most accurate scores, processes called adaptive testing and equating are used. Read this guide to learn what these terms mean, how they affect you, and what has to happen before you get your official GRE scores.

An Introduction to GRE Scores

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how the GRE is scored, let’s first look at some key GRE numbers. In this section, we’ll go over the possible scores you can get on the GRE and what the average score for each section is.

After you complete the GRE, you’ll receive three scores: Quantitative Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and Analytical Writing.  Quantitative Reasoning and Verbal Reasoning both have a score scale of 130-170 , in one-point increments. Your unofficial scores for both of these sections will appear on your computer screen immediately after you finish the test.

The Analytical Writing section has a score range of 0-6 , in half-point increments. This score will be available online, along with your official scores for the other two sections, about 10-15 days after you complete the GRE. You’ll receive an email telling you to check your My GRE account once they’re available.

Based on data collected by ETS (the organization which develops and administers the GRE), the average scores for the GRE are:

• Verbal Reasoning: 150
• Quantitative Reasoning: 152
• Analytical Writing: 3.6

But where do those numbers come from? How is the GRE scored? What does ETS do to ensure the tests are fair and people don’t receive a lower score just because the test they took that day was harder than a test given last year?

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Read on to learn each of the steps that have to happen before you receive your GRE scores. The first process we’ll be discussing is adaptive testing.

What Is Adaptive Testing? How Does It Affect You?

If you are taking the GRE on the computer (as most people do), Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning will be “section-level adaptive.”

What does this mean? On the GRE, both Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning have two sections, referred to as “measures” by the ETS.  How well you do on the first of these measures determines which questions the second measure will contain and how challenging those questions will be.  Basically, your first measure for a section will have medium-difficulty questions, and how well you do on those questions will determine if the questions in your next measure are pulled mostly from the easy, medium, or challenging question bank.

So if you only get one question wrong on the first Quantitative Reasoning measure, your second Quantitative Reasoning measure will have more challenging questions, compared to the second measure of someone who only got half the questions on the first measure correct.

The types of questions you answered incorrectly on the first measure don’t matter. If you got all the geometry questions wrong on the first measure, that doesn’t mean only geometry questions will be easier in the second measure; the only thing that matters for this is the number of questions you answered incorrectly .

Also, if you do really well on the first measure, that doesn’t mean every question in the second measure will be extremely difficult to solve. Conversely, if you don’t do very well on the first measure, the questions in the second measure won’t all be easy either. The adaptive testing just means that, in general, if you do well on the first measure, your questions on the second measure will be a bit more difficult than someone who didn’t do as well.

When you’re taking the GRE, you won’t receive any scores until the end of the exam (and those just for the entire Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning sections), so you won’t know how well you did on the first measure or which difficulty level your second measure questions are.

Adaptive testing allows more differentiation between the scores of test takers so schools and others viewing GRE scores can have a more accurate idea of how well individuals did on the exam. If you got 10/20 questions correct on the first Verbal Reasoning measure and then got a perfect 20/20 on the second measure, your final section score won’t be quite as high as someone who got 18/20 questions correct on the first measure and then 12/20 on the second measure. Even though you both ended up getting 30/40 questions correct, the person who got 18/20 questions correct on the first measure will have been given more challenging questions than you did on the second measure. The increased difficulty of these questions results in a slightly higher final score.

Adaptive testing also means that how well you do on the first measure of a section is slightly more important than how well you do on the second measure. This is because your score on the first measure affects the difficulty of the questions you get on the second measure, and you can only get a top score if your second measure questions are the highest difficulty level. However, on the whole, don’t worry about adaptive testing too much. Your goal should be to answer as many questions correctly as you can , which would be your strategy even if the GRE didn’t use adaptive testing.

How Are Raw GRE Scores Converted to Scaled Scores?

After adaptive scoring, another process comes into play before you can get your official score. Your raw score has to be converted to a scaled score (the official score you receive).

Your raw score is the number of points you earned on the exam (you get a point for each question you answer correctly, and no points are deducted for incorrect answers). However, the scores you receive for both Quantitative Reasoning and Verbal Reasoning will be between 130 and 170. Since Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning both have 40 questions each, you might assume that your final score is just 130 + the number of questions you answered correctly. While this is close, it’s not completely true.

So how are GRE scores calculated? And why can’t just the raw score be used? The process of GRE raw score conversion is known as equating. Equating is done in order to control for slight variations in difficulty between exams and specific exam questions.  First, this means that, if the GRE you took one day is slightly more difficult than a version someone took a few months ago, equating will be used to ensure that your score isn’t unfairly impacted by the more challenging exam. It’d be impossible to have every version of the GRE be exactly the same level of difficulty, so equating ensures that average scores stay consistent across different versions of the test.

Additionally, equating also controls for the difficulty of the questions you answered in the second measure of each section.  In essence, equating takes into account both how many questions you answered correctly as well as how difficult those questions were.

To look at an example like the scenario described in the adaptive testing section, if you answered 30 questions out of 40 correct on Verbal Reasoning, your score might be just a straight 160 (130 + 30), or it might be a 158 if the questions you answered were easier and/or your test as a whole was easier than average. On the other hand, your score might be, say, a 163 if the questions you answered were more difficult than average.

The exact process ETS uses for equating isn’t publicly disclosed, but, like adaptive testing, it won’t have a huge impact on your final score , and your main goal should still be to answer as many problems correctly as you can.

How Are the GRE Essays Graded?

Because they aren’t multiple choice, the two GRE essays in the Analytical Writing section go through a different scoring process than Quantitative Reasoning and Verbal Reasoning . This process is more straight-forward than the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning scoring process, although it does involve robots (sort of).

Each essay is read by at a trained grader and given a score from 0-6. Then the essay is scored by an e-reader, a computer program developed by ETS to measure writing proficiency based on scores in multiple areas. If the human grader’s and e-reader’s scores “closely agree” (are within a point of each other), then the average of those two scores is used as the final essay score. If they disagree, a second human grader scores the essay, and the average of the two human scores is the final essay score.

To get the final Analytical Writing score, the two essay scores are averaged, and that value is rounded to the nearest half-point.

How Are Paper GREs Scored?

Most people take the GRE on the computer, but if there are no computer test centers near you, then you’ll take the GRE on paper. On page 118 of the GRE Guide to the Paper-Based Test, you can see a sample paper-based exam score scale. Looking at this will give you an idea of what your score will be based on how many questions you answer correctly, but be aware that this can vary a lot, more so than the computer-based exam.

The scoring process of paper-based GREs is similar to that for computer-based GREs, but there are a few differences.

The biggest difference is that there is no adaptive scoring because, obviously, on a paper exam, a test taker’s scores on the first measure of a section can’t be immediately graded and used to select the questions of the second measure. Instead of adaptive scoring, medium-difficulty questions are used for both measures.  Equating is still used when converting from raw scores to converted scores, and this also takes the difficulty level of the questions into account. Also, part of the purpose of equating is to ensure that the paper-based and computer-based GREs have an equal level of difficulty, so don’t worry about one test format giving you a disadvantage.

For Analytical Writing, no e-reader is used to grade the essays. Instead, two human graders are used, and, if the scores they award vary by more than one point, a third human grader is used, and the final essay score is the average of those three scores. Otherwise, scoring is the same between the paper-based and computer-based versions of the GRE.

What Does GRE Scoring Mean for You?

The process of scoring your GRE is much more than simply adding up the number of questions you answered correctly. Adaptive scoring is used to determine question difficulty and differentiate more between top-scorers. The process of converting from raw scores to scaled scores is known as equating, and it takes question difficulty into account in addition to the number of questions answered correctly. GRE essays are graded using a combination of human graders and computer programs. The process for grading paper-based GREs is similar, but there is no adaptive scoring and only human graders score the essay.

What all this means is that, first of all, you don’t need to worry if the GRE is harder or easier on the day you choose to take the exam because these differences are controlled for. Additionally, getting more questions correct in the first measure of the Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning sections will give your final scores a slight boost because of adaptive scoring. So make sure you don’t just breeze through the first questions on the test in order to get everything answered.

While the process of how the GRE is scored can seem complicated, it’s important to not worry too much about it. The best thing you can do to get a high score is answer as many questions correctly as you can, regardless of adaptive scoring and equating.

What’s Next?

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Author: Christine Sarikas

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries. View all posts by Christine Sarikas