GRE AW percentile ranking

[Mirabilis]

Have people noticed on the "Interpreting your GRE scores" handout how much the percentile ranks for similar AW score have jumped in the past 5-6 years? I took the GRE for the first time back in 2007 and scored a 4 on AW; 33% scored below this. I retook the GRE this past week and (much to my dismay) scored a 4 again; this time, however, a 4 put me ahead of 54% of test-takers. I also noticed that fewer people have been taking the GRE since the 2007-2008 score interpretations came out. I wonder if the AW is being graded differently in recent years? Are we dealing with a less talented test-taker pool? 

[123hardasABC]

I'm not familiar with the grading of the old GRE, but I've been told by a few admissions officers that they don't care about the AW portion so long as the score is at least a 3. Because of that, I didn't study for AW and just winged it. My guess is that since AW has so little weight in the overall GRE score, very little people bother to score well in it.