GRE Prep – Analytical Writing Assessment

Preparing for the GRE often seems like a sea of flash cards. Everyday you’re taught to drill math problems, vocabulary builders, and logic questions. All this effort is to help you achieve scores as close to 800 as possible. However, its easy to forget that when your envelop arrives from ETS there will be 3 scores inside two of which will fall between 200 and 800 and one that will be between 1 and 6. The third portion of the GRE is Analytical Writing Assesment or AWA. This portion is scored between 1 and 6 and is likely the most difficult part of the test to prepare for.

Hopefully this blog post by Jeff Sackman will help you better prepare. He understands the importance of knowing your reader and uses this article to tell you a little about who you’ll be writing for on the AWA portion of the GRE.

“Two people will be scoring your essays, and they will probably be college or university faculty. To qualify for the role of “reader”, these individuals had to pass a scoring test. That means they had to score a collection of previously (secretly) scored essays, and come up with the same scores (plus or minus a point on a select few).”

Read the rest of his article to find out how these select few are able to determine a ‘fair’ score in under 3 minutes an essay.

http://www.grehq.com/gre-awa/who-scores-the-gre-analytical-writing-assessment.html