One favorite past-time of grad studies applicants and students everywhere (or at least online) is griping about why their GRE scores do not reflect their overwhelming brainpower. Yep, I do it, too. But one thing I do not ever complain about (no doubt at least in part because I got a perfect score) is the analytical writing (AW) section. However, I may be the only one who doesn't.
Many people rightly note that the GRE writing section does not give them the opportunity to show what a good writer they really are. This is especially important in humanities programs that actually care about writing ability. (Based on published work, it appears that economics programs, for instance, actively recruit for low verbal skill, ahem.) But of course, these departments don't use your GRE AW as a measure of your academic writing ability; that is what the writing sample is for. (The writing sample is from what I have read usually a 10-20 page paper or excerpt from a paper, preferably written on a topic relevant to the course of study you are applying for.)
People complain that the grading of the AW rewards "simple grammar," adhering to a "dull format," "dumbing yourself down," etc. (real quotes). Well, I've only taken the test once, but I did not find it necessary to write in some kind of Super Basic English For Communicating With Morons or use a Fill in the Blank Automatic Essay Generator in order to get a 6.
I suspect that a big part of the problem is that many people are simply not successful at writing a cogent, well-organized essay on a topic outside of their area of expertise (e.g. an English lit major facing the topic of analyzing a mayor's proposal to increase tax revenue in the town) under strict timed conditions and with no resources (factual or writing-related). This is a different thing from writing a thoroughly researched and massaged 30-page paper on Jane Austen. The AW section is the new "analytical" section of the exam. While it does grade you for your ability to write with good grammar, spelling, etc., it is also looking for an ability to write a brief persuasive essay or analyze an argument. I think some of these people might freak out less if they put more emphasis on the "analytical" than the "writing" in the name of the test. Though clearly, nobody wants to believe that they have poor analytical ability, this may be less of an identity threat to a humanities student.
Of course, there's no better way to deal with the problem than to say that the test is utterly bogus, so maybe I don't have anything to add after all.
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I haven't seen how those essays are really graded, but from the sample essays ETS puts out (they have samples with various grades), I didn't find that it was a "dumbed down" exercise. They seemed to value what I thought they should value - detailed, cogent, relevant arguments with specific examples, written grammatically in complex sentences. That's what I aimed for when I took the exam, and I got 5.5 out of 6, which seems right. Your 6 out of 6 also seems right.
I'm honestly not quite sure what would cause a person who can write well to not score well on that section if they did even the very most basic preparation (like reading the sample essays to see what ETS is looking for).
Based on my extremely incomplete knowledge, I think those people are probably full of crap.
Pardon the serial comment, but about this:
...I did not find it necessary to write in some kind of Super Basic English For Communicating With Morons or use a Fill in the Blank Automatic Essay Generator in order to get a 6.Out of curiosity...I am assuming that you wrote essentially the best essay that you could produce on the topic at hand given the time constraints. Is that right?
Yeah, I basically wrote the best essay I could under the circumstances, while perhaps paying greater attention than usual to ensure that my punctuation and other such details were as standard as I could make them. (For instance, not including a parenthetical comment like this -- or dashes...or ellipses -- that I might in a less formal context employ.)
Also, I frankly wasn't very impressed with the examples ETS provided of what a "6" essay looks like. I found it fairly easy to write what (IMO) was a better essay. But I recognize that I am a faster writer of reasonably good first drafts compared to the typical person, so I was able to come up with a longer, better-developed essay with plenty of time left over.
Right. I wasn't trying to say that their 6 essay was fantastic, just that the progression from 1 to 6 in their examples seemed reasonable and seemed to be rewarding the qualities you'd want to see in analytical writing. They didn't seem to have strange or arbitrary things they wanted to see.
I have scored essays on some standardized tests and one of the biggest ways to get a low or mediocre score is to not answer the actual question. If the question says pick a side and give some reasons and you never pick a side or give zero to one reasons, then you might not get a good score. Saying things like "This is a very good question testing important skills" does not help your score. Saying "I ran out of time" or "My answer is in the question booklet" does not help your score.
It's apparently very easy to get distracted and write about some issue related to the question (and perhaps more interesting than the question) instead of the actual assignment.
Debbie, interesting...those seem like pretty stupid mistakes to make. I would have said that they seem stupider than I would have imagined, but I have seen people online *brag* about writing an essay about why the GRE AW test is dumb (instead of answering the actual question) so...yeah. Have you found the tests hard to grade at all? Do you think that it is relatively straightforward to grade them? Were there any aspects of the grading rubric you disagreed with/found flawed?
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