How did this happen....

[MyWorkIsDone]

I am having serious GRE trauma. 

 

Just got my final scores, and they are so not what I was hoping for. I got a 163 V, 139 Q (ouch), and a 4.0 AWA (49th percentile).

Now, the math I'm not surprised about (and already ranted about in another post--sorry). But I really expected to do A LOT better on the writing. Because not to toot my own horn, but writing is kind of my thang. Or at least I thought it was. 

Seriously though, I've always been a really good writer (maybe to compensate for my abysmal math skills). I just don't understand how this happened. What did I do wrong? Does anyone have any insight or words of wisdom? 

 

I'm a third year now, not applying until fall 2014, so I will definitely be retaking it. I've signed up for a math prep course, but what should I do about the writing??? My advisor here tells me that my writing sample is great, and that I have "a talent for verbal expression", so I just don't understand what went wrong and I'm feeling super down about it right now. 

[33andathirdRPM]

AW is a complete crapshoot. If you're confident that your writing sample was better than the score you received, you could always pay for a rescore.

 

By any chance do you have any data from the programs you're considering about their preferred GRE scores?

[MyWorkIsDone]

As far as I know, most of mine are looking for high verbal and writing scores, and maybe don't care as much about the quant. 

It's just really frustrating because I felt like I had done very well on the writing, and that all I had to worry about improving was the math. Nope...

[VBD]

I am a horrible writer, with many of my draft manuscripts riddled with misplaced modifiers, wrong word choice, dependent clauses stuck out by themselves, and many many comma splices. So I was worried about the AWA. I'm sure you're 100% the better writer than me. However, I read the AWA section help in the Kaplan and Princeton review books. The only advice they gave me was to follow the traditional layout. It seems extremely formulaic (but I don't remember it, sorry!), and as long as you follow it, you have a good chance to survive the crapshoot unscathed. I did and surprisingly got a 5.5 

 

So please don't beat yourself up about this AWA score since it really doesn't reflect on your writing ability that much. Toot away on your currently non-GRE awesome writing. Own it. 

 

Also and perhaps more importantly, some programs KNOW that the AWA sucks, and if they are a writing intensive program, they will ask for your writing sample (which I'm sure you'd rock). 

[Shelley Burian]

The writing section is NOT a measure of your ability to write well but to write a certain kind of prompt well, often in a way which directly contradicts the kind of writing humanities students are taught. Your writing sample will be the true judgement of your ability for adcoms and POIs

[HannahPie]

I used The Princeton Review book to help me study which was enormously helpful for many reasons, but one of the primary ones being that they said the one thing all of the top-rated essays had in common was length. Not excellent vocab, not extremely logical reasoning, but just sheer word count. When I took the GRE, I just tried to make my essays as long as possible without being ridiculous and without totally forgetting about those other characteristics of good writing, and I ended up in the 92nd percentile. Since you're a good writer already, I would really just focus on writing as much as possible in the time you're allotted.

 

ALSO: Everyone else here is right; your writing sample is much more important anyway, so don't stress over writing The Greatest Answer Ever. The professors will see your abilities without having to turn to your GRE score for confirmation.

[architecture 604]

I'm a pretty bad writer, so I was really nervous about taking the Writing GRE portion. The night before the test I looked over the Writing sections in Princeton Reviews book. The Argumentative Essay is a pretty strange format, however my prep book gave me a word for word template for structuring the essay. Practice this! I wrote the template out a few times by hand to practice it and went over it on the train the next morning. Also, for the Issue Essay, all of the possible Issue topics are listed on ETS website so it may be helpful to do a few test runs, practice coming up with examples really quickly. 

 

I actually ended up getting a 6 on the Writing so I think these strategies really helped me (especially memorizing the Argumentative template). However, I also got a 140 on the Quant, so my scores are pretty all over the place. 

 

Good luck!

[33andathirdRPM]

Wish I had known about the essay topics before I took the exam. Then again, AW isn't extraordinarily important for my program. Still, higher scores are always nice.

[raisinbrancusi]

i've recently been helping some high school students out with their composition skills. i think it helps to review the most basic formulaic approaches to argument construction before you take your GRE, i.e. the things you sort of graduated from when you started writing in a more sophisticated way. on one hand, it's easy to dismiss these really basic ways into essay-writing, but on the other, it gives (or at least gave me) a sense of my reader that i had taken for granted as i fell--head first; deeply--into the swamps of what we think of as academic prose.

so, they ask for really basic, straightforward writing, with little room for nuance and playful thought. but i think one can revisit their habits to pander to the test and still get something out of it. (i know this doesn't help much, i also didn't do as well as i would have liked on the GRE's writing section).

Edited January 31, 2013 by raisinbrancusi

[crossedfingerscrossedeyes]

Watch the time, and when it gets to be five minutes left, start EDITING. It's completely worth it. You'll have been so busy trying to write *SOMETHING* in the prior 25 minutes that you'll need the time to make sure everything makes sense grammatical (or at least I did, and it got me 5.5).