warpspeed

I have the most respect for people in all fields and think no less of one or the other. However, the "respect' is lower simply because of the applications of English pale in comparison to many other fields which have far larger impacts and address more pressing needs in the world. To most people, this is why English and many other Liberal Arts seem less "important".

You got a near perfect score. You'll live. Cut the self righteous attitude and sass because no matter where you are, it will only affect you negatively. And from the personality you portray on the internet, it will likely affect you behind your back without your knowledge.

You got a near perfect score. You'll live. Cut the self righteous attitude and sass because no matter where you are, it will only affect you negatively. And from the personality you portray on the internet, it will likely affect you behind your back without your knowledge.

You got a near perfect score. You'll live. Cut the self righteous attitude and sass because no matter where you are, it will only affect you negatively. And from the personality you portray on the internet, it will likely affect you behind your back without your knowledge.

Seriously, was it necessary to write a whole paragraph recalling your high school writing skills and how that's not reflected in the "subjectively graded portion" of your gre? Apparently, your AP English Composition teacher's subjective opinion of you differs from those of the people (and computer) who graded your AWA portion.

I'm not sure if you've worked with grad students before, but your attitude is going to get crushed in grad school.

Yeah. I can't really do anything about my ears (they're stretched to 3/4", but the contour is still relatively natural) but honestly, most of my extended family still hasn't noticed and I've had them for 7 years. I look extremely presentable when everything's covered, and even when its not. My u/g adviser hasn't seen my arms yet but he knows about my ears, etc and has never seemed bothered. My field school teacher saw me in shorts around the field house and knows i have arm tattoos and didn't make mention of it. I like the idea of playing it safe and letting people judge me on my ability first and my appearance later and I'll probably take that advice.

Also, anthropologygeek, I read through your post a second time. There's nothing "lucky" about not having any tattoos or body modification, I'm not a stray dog that got tattooed by the pound. We all make decisions that are right for ourselves

probably throw up. then eat alot. likely involving brownies and other forms of chocolate. hang out with my dog and buy him a nice big bone.

I ended up calling mine "'A Good Serviceable Fiction': Capital, Form, and Carpenter's Gothic" - though a better title might have been something like "Hope You're Comfortable: This Paper is Ass Long."

I had one program that accepted me over the phone. I reciprocated, when I declined that offer, by calling that person directly. He thanked me specifically for calling, and said he wouldn't have wanted to find out via email.

If a potential adviser or department chair called you to give you your acceptance, give them the same courtesy.

GRE is going to hurt you. I'd advise you to retake it.

I think this is an excellent idea. If you don't have any luck in your first round of apps, mmace, this is definitely something to consider.

Yeah. I can't really do anything about my ears (they're stretched to 3/4", but the contour is still relatively natural) but honestly, most of my extended family still hasn't noticed and I've had them for 7 years. I look extremely presentable when everything's covered, and even when its not. My u/g adviser hasn't seen my arms yet but he knows about my ears, etc and has never seemed bothered. My field school teacher saw me in shorts around the field house and knows i have arm tattoos and didn't make mention of it. I like the idea of playing it safe and letting people judge me on my ability first and my appearance later and I'll probably take that advice.

Also, anthropologygeek, I read through your post a second time. There's nothing "lucky" about not having any tattoos or body modification, I'm not a stray dog that got tattooed by the pound. We all make decisions that are right for ourselves

Yeah. I can't really do anything about my ears (they're stretched to 3/4", but the contour is still relatively natural) but honestly, most of my extended family still hasn't noticed and I've had them for 7 years. I look extremely presentable when everything's covered, and even when its not. My u/g adviser hasn't seen my arms yet but he knows about my ears, etc and has never seemed bothered. My field school teacher saw me in shorts around the field house and knows i have arm tattoos and didn't make mention of it. I like the idea of playing it safe and letting people judge me on my ability first and my appearance later and I'll probably take that advice.

Also, anthropologygeek, I read through your post a second time. There's nothing "lucky" about not having any tattoos or body modification, I'm not a stray dog that got tattooed by the pound. We all make decisions that are right for ourselves

Yeah. I can't really do anything about my ears (they're stretched to 3/4", but the contour is still relatively natural) but honestly, most of my extended family still hasn't noticed and I've had them for 7 years. I look extremely presentable when everything's covered, and even when its not. My u/g adviser hasn't seen my arms yet but he knows about my ears, etc and has never seemed bothered. My field school teacher saw me in shorts around the field house and knows i have arm tattoos and didn't make mention of it. I like the idea of playing it safe and letting people judge me on my ability first and my appearance later and I'll probably take that advice.

Also, anthropologygeek, I read through your post a second time. There's nothing "lucky" about not having any tattoos or body modification, I'm not a stray dog that got tattooed by the pound. We all make decisions that are right for ourselves

Luckily theres a variety of men with semi pointless lives with my name. Good thing is I'm female. If you search my name and University all that comes up are Dean's List awards and articles I wrote for our school paper from being a journalism major. I did check my facebook a few weeks ago to see what it looked like publicly to find the only activity listed was "not wearing pants." Oops.

Luckily theres a variety of men with semi pointless lives with my name. Good thing is I'm female. If you search my name and University all that comes up are Dean's List awards and articles I wrote for our school paper from being a journalism major. I did check my facebook a few weeks ago to see what it looked like publicly to find the only activity listed was "not wearing pants." Oops.

From what people I've interviewed/met with who sit on adcoms have told me, they can tell why people are applying to their program through their SOP. If you don't put effort into your SOP, they should just accept you because they're lesser known? Sounds like a quick way to rejection to me...

From what people I've interviewed/met with who sit on adcoms have told me, they can tell why people are applying to their program through their SOP. If you don't put effort into your SOP, they should just accept you because they're lesser known? Sounds like a quick way to rejection to me...

Frankly, I think the reasons people are troubled by the AW section are different from those they cite. Let's look at some common criticisms:

1) "The AW section does not test any real-world skills! How often in your academic life will you need to write a 5-paragraph essay in 30 minutes? Never!"

This is equally valid for more or less any standardized test. How often in your academic life are you called upon to complete an analogy "upbraid : reproach :: ? : ?" picking from 5 different alternatives, without the help of a dictionary? Certainly you must agree that, prima facie, the "write an essay in 30 minutes" is more connected with skills you will actually have to use in academic life than completing analogies. And yet, people do not complain nearly as much about the verbal section.

2) OMG, I got 800 on the verbal test, but only 3.5 on the AWA, the AWA must be bonkers!

a) It seldom crosses people's minds that it could be that the verbal section is bonkers.

b ) More seriously, really, AW and verbal sections are meant to test two very different skills. There is really nothing that says that a person with a good vocabulary and reading comprehension must be a good writer. It's kind of like saying "OMG, I got 800+++ on verbal, but only 320 on quantitative, the quantitative section is obviously rubbish", but nobody does that, do they? And while I agree that you should expect a higher correlation between verbal section and AW section than between quantitative and verbal sections, say, that correlation certainly is not high enough to make "800V, 3.5AW" statistically unexpected.

3) "The SOP and writing samples are much better judges of writing capacity anyway, so AW is positively useless."

This is true to some extent, were it not for a fact that it is way too easy to have someone else heavily edit your SOP and writing samples, or indeed write it for you completely. The AWA does not suffer from that. And I this a glowing SOP and writing sample combined with a low AW score will raise some eyebrows, as it should.

4) "The type of writing required on the AW is nothing near anything you'll ever need to write in real life. They just require a long, dry 5-paragraph essay, with lots of stock transitional phrases. Nothing like the style of a good writer."

a) I'd like to see some hard data on this. It seems to me that this is the kind of myths that companies like Princeton Review perpetrate for their own benefit ("There is a secret formula that guarantees a 6 on the AWA, go to our classes/buy our books to find out!")

b ) As people have pointed out, good writers should be able to adapt their style depending on the circumstances.

5) "But how can people adapt, if ETS does not publish what criteria they use to assess the essays?"

a) See a) above. Also, if ETS have never said anything about what they want, how come there is such a strong consensus on these boards and others about the type of essays that will earn a high score?

b ) Admissions committees seldom publish what they want to see in the SOP. And yet nobody complains. Commercial publishing houses rarely make explicit what kind of texts they want. And nobody complains. People just seem to be able to figure out anyway, just like they do with the AWA.

6) "Not to brag, but I'm a truly great writer, and yet I got a low AW score. The AW section is just crap.

a) See 4b)

b ) I think that more often than not, people are bad judges of their own writing abilities.

c) Even if there is anecdotal evidence of great writers who don't get high scores, this is statistically expected for any imperfect test, just like there could be great mathematicians who receive a bad score of the quantitative section. Anecdotal evidence like that does not prove that the whole test is invalid, only that it does not have 100% validity.

7) The test is scored by a e-rater. Computers don't know jack all about wit.

I agree that this does hold some merit. But

a) See 4b).

b ) There is still a human grader too. If you get a low score on an essay, at least one human grader has assigned it a grade within 0.5 of what you received.


So, going out on a limb here, I think the real reason people complain so much about the AW section is because it is subjectively black-box scored. This makes it very easy to start rationalizing away low AW scores by declaring the whole process to be invalid. Which we all do, because of our human nature. The reason that we don't see as many posts similarly complaining about the other sections is that the scoring is much more transparent, which makes it harder to come up with those rationalizations.

But what many people forget, in my opinion, is that there are two parts to whether or not a test measures what it claims to measure: validity of the test quations, and validity of the scoring. I think that, compared to the other two parts of the GRE, the task the AW section sets us is in fact closest to anything we will need to tackle in real life. The scoring on the other hand, might or might not be completely rubbish, but I do not see hard data either way.

Hi,

Can you rank or comment on the following schools in terms of their overall reputation and quality. I am applying for Physics phd, concentrated in condensed matter and statistical physics.

Also, do you think it is possible to get an acceptance without a physics subject test. (I have a MSc degree in physics, published two papers in phys. rev., have a GRE quantative score of 800)

The schools I am applying are:

Brown
University of Michigan
Carnegie Mellon
Rice
University of Florida
Duke


Thanks!!

note: i am an international student

You need to resend them. They should be in their original envelopes. You can call the schools and perhaps ask for an extension, but this is most likely mentioned in their application that they should be mailed straight from the registrar or in their sealed envelopes with notary to prevent tampering.

Hey everyone! I recently took the GRE. I'm actually still waiting on my AWA score. I'm not placing much importance on it though, especially after reading that the essay is scored in part by "e-raters" or computer readers. I wrote (what I thought) was a creative and attention-grabbing introduction for my Issue essay and I found that both of my essays read well rhetorically and made good use of GRE vocabulary. I'm now wondering whether all of that was for naught, given the way the essays are graded. Here's a simplified explanation along with some articles with further information. Essentially you have a human reader and a bot reader. An essay that a human reader might praise for rhetorical finesse or incisiveness might be completely lost on the bot which is programmed to look for very specific features. Apparently if you misspell certain transition words (e.g. "therefore," "furthermore," etc.) the program erroneously penalizes your essay for lack of structure. The human grader is pressured to assign very strict scores using the most rigid and trite templates as guidelines (e.g. the 5 paragraph high school essay) because sincere scoring would call their work into question (i.e. if they constantly disagree with the computer). This would necessitate too much intervention from "third" (read: human) readers, which is costly to ETS. I think it's a shame that this is being done mostly (if not, entirely) for cost-cutting reasons (don't we pay ETS enough... and indeed, overpay them?). These essays are supposed to measure our analytical reasoning and an algorithm might be able to pinpoint some classical signs of good reasoning and structure but with the consequence of completely eschewing creativity and the kind of original writing many of us will go on to do in graduate school, it's no wonder a lot of humanities programs accord little importance to the AWA score.

http://awatips.blogspot.com/2007/05/using-strategy.html (This is about the GMAT but apparently it's applicable to the GRE as well)
http://awatips.blogspot.com/2007/05/about-e-rater.html (Ditto)
http://www.800score.com/gmat-essay.html (Ditto)
http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0524testautoscore.html

Since score recipients receive copies of our AWA essays, they would be better judges than the e-rater as to the quality of our writing. However, as it has often been stressed on this site, a solid writing sample and SOP are clearly better examples of one's writing and argumentation skills. I scored 800 on the Verbal section and I suspect that other 800 scores and some folks with 700+ scores might find that a score below a 5 on the AWA is a blow to our otherwise impressive GRE scores. I've encountered a plethora of threads initiated by high Verbal scorers who seem devastated about receiving a low AWA score. I don't know my AWA score yet but I'm sure I didn't do everything I could have to "please" the bot reader, so I personally won't be too disappointed if it's below a 5 and I certainly won't take it as an indication of my writing abilities. I hope this thread is helpful to those of you who (especially in the humanities) have aced the Verbal but not the AWA or who have yet to take the exam. Don't worry about the AWA; knock 'em dead with your writing sample and SOP!

They aren't all "egraders" or "computer graders," my best friend's mom grades AWAs for ETS. She's been a Rutgers composition professor for YEARS. And from what she's told me, every essay gets a once over with human eyes. I know its a frustrating test, but this really seems like you're trying default the possibility of you getting any score under perfect as "the computer's fault" or "ETS's fault," when in reality, it's not. This is the game, play it their way or don't play it all.

Furthermore, it irritates me that people think that just because they have high verbal scores means they got cheated on the AWA. Writing and verbal test very different things. I have a perfect score on the writing and a slightly above average (~80% percentile) verbal. Good writers are able to adapt to the needs of their work. A need here is to adapt to their dry style. If you can't change your writing style on the fly to a very basic, run of the mill standard, then really how good fo a writer are you?

They aren't all "egraders" or "computer graders," my best friend's mom grades AWAs for ETS. She's been a Rutgers composition professor for YEARS. And from what she's told me, every essay gets a once over with human eyes. I know its a frustrating test, but this really seems like you're trying default the possibility of you getting any score under perfect as "the computer's fault" or "ETS's fault," when in reality, it's not. This is the game, play it their way or don't play it all.

Furthermore, it irritates me that people think that just because they have high verbal scores means they got cheated on the AWA. Writing and verbal test very different things. I have a perfect score on the writing and a slightly above average (~80% percentile) verbal. Good writers are able to adapt to the needs of their work. A need here is to adapt to their dry style. If you can't change your writing style on the fly to a very basic, run of the mill standard, then really how good fo a writer are you?

They aren't all "egraders" or "computer graders," my best friend's mom grades AWAs for ETS. She's been a Rutgers composition professor for YEARS. And from what she's told me, every essay gets a once over with human eyes. I know its a frustrating test, but this really seems like you're trying default the possibility of you getting any score under perfect as "the computer's fault" or "ETS's fault," when in reality, it's not. This is the game, play it their way or don't play it all.

Furthermore, it irritates me that people think that just because they have high verbal scores means they got cheated on the AWA. Writing and verbal test very different things. I have a perfect score on the writing and a slightly above average (~80% percentile) verbal. Good writers are able to adapt to the needs of their work. A need here is to adapt to their dry style. If you can't change your writing style on the fly to a very basic, run of the mill standard, then really how good fo a writer are you?