Analytical Writing Assesment

In this post I would be discussing about the AWA section of the GMAT. I myself got screwed in this particular section so disclaimer is always there. But I did some research on it and I will be sharing few things about it.

AWA stands for "analytical writing assessment" and it is the first section in the exam. It consists of two essays to be completed in 30 mins each. The first one is 'Analysis of an Issue' and the second one is 'Analysis of an Argument'.

Analytical Writing Assessment Score:-

The AWA score is an average of the score you will get in your 'analysis of an issue' essay and 'analysis of an argument' essay.

Scores for the AWA range from 0 to 6 in half-point intervals.

Your score of AWA have no effect on your verbal and QA score.

How AWA Is Scored

Each of your essays will be scored by two reviewers. The first score would be given by a college student or a university faculty member. The other score would be given by a software! This software is trained to identify the basic structural elements of the English language. GMAC claims the software has more than 50 structural and linguistic features, including organization of ideas, syntactic variety, and topical analysis. Also it compares your essay with many others that it has already read and judged. The thing with the software scoring is that it does not matter if you put an interesting point of view in your essay, the software would just ignore it. In fact it might penalize you for not writing the most common points!

If the two ratings differ by more than one point, one more evaluation is done by an expert reader to determine the final score.

The human reader judges your essay in the following areas. 

• the overall quality of your ideas about the issue and argument presented
• your overall ability to organize, develop, and express those ideas
• the relevant supporting reasons and examples you used
• your ability to control the elements of standard written English

They are also trained to be fair to test takers who do not have English as their native language.

Tips to score well in AWA:-

1) Write as much as possible - ETS did some research on the essays that scored highest and found that their was one thing common in all of them. It was length.

2) Create a template -  A template is something like a pre determined structure you will be following. It helps you to already organize your points before starting. Princeton has some really good material on this. I would reccommend you read it once to know how it works.

3) Be specific while putting your view point - If you say something like " I really like the concept", it wont fetch you good points. Instead of saying this its better to provide reasons as in why you like this concept.

4) Edit Edit and Edit - Keep editing, in fact keep 3 mins at the end to finally recise and then submit your essays.

Hope you follow these and kill the AWA section. All the best!