You just want to earn a decent score, without exerting too much effort – especially if you choose to do the IR and AWA sections at the beginning of the exam. You want admissions committees to read your application carefully and enthusiastically, right?įor the AWA, you don't necessarily care if the human grader (or the GMAT computer) actually reads your essay. When I wrote about the people who read (or skim) your MBA essays, I claimed that you should strive to make your application essays interesting. (And if anybody asks, you'll surely claim that you read every single word with great care.) How to Get a Decent AWA Score… With Minimal Effort ![]() You'll skim the introduction, maybe read the first sentence of each paragraph, and then maybe skim the conclusion. Are you going to read every single word? Hell no. But this human probably doesn't actually read your GMAT essays any more closely than the computer.Īgain, imagine that you're the poor slob who gets paid $20-25/hour (as of a few years ago, GRE and TOEFL graders earned $20/hour I don't know whether the rate is similar for GMAT) to read bazillions of these AWA essays, most of which are tragically bereft of interesting content. The "human" is ultimately looking for the same things as the computer when she grades a GMAT AWA essay: structure, clarity, correctness, richness of language, and so on. (Again, I've seen some horrid spellers get really good scores.) I suspect very strongly that a reasonable structure is the most important part of the AWA scoring system spelling might not even count at all. Obviously, the computer's exact scoring system is a closely guarded secret, but I'm convinced that the program primarily looks for structure using basic keyword algorithms.įrom there, it probably counts things like the average number of words per sentence and the average number of letters per word, and then it checks for grammar, usage, variety of words used, and perhaps spelling. How GMAT AWA Grading WorksĪs you may already know, GMAT AWA essays are graded both by a computer and by a human if there's a discrepancy between the two scores, then an additional human reads the essay. ![]() They took advantage of the fact that nobody really reads your GMAT AWA essay. I've seen some legitimately terrible writers earn scores of 5.0 or 5.5. So what does it take to earn a "reasonably high" AWA score? Not much, really. After all, MBA programs are looking for business leaders with decent communication skills, not Nobel Prize-winning novelists. MBA admissions committees might start to wonder if your AWA score is below 3 or 4, but I see absolutely no reason to worry if your score is reasonably high. To be fair, it’s probably not a good idea to completely embarrass yourself on AWA, but a solid-but-imperfect AWA score of, say, 5.0 almost certainly won’t keep you out of Stanford or Harvard. Sure, it might be nice to fill MBA programs with excellent writers, but that’s far from the front of business schools’ minds, and AWA scores have been shown to correlate only very weakly to student performance in MBA programs. So most schools don’t really give a crap about it. The AWA section has absolutely nothing to do with your composite score, and it therefore has no impact on MBA rankings. ![]() Unfortunately, some MBA rankings schemes penalize b-schools with low average GMAT scores, so admissions committees are forced to obsess over your GMAT composite results. Let’s start with the biggest reason why MBA programs care so deeply about GMAT scores in the first place: rankings. Why MBA Programs Barely Care About GMAT AWA There’s rarely any need to spend more than a token amount of time on AWA. If you’re one of the rare students who worries about the GMAT AWA section, please don’t. Most GMAT students we've met really don't worry all that much about the Analytical Writing (AWA) portion of the test, but we occasionally meet somebody who is absolutely neurotic about this section of the GMAT.
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