GRE Writing Practice

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mplsgirl

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Hey Everyone.....is anyone around that could look at and comment on practice essays in preparation for the GRE? I take it on Friday and would love comments or, "ratings" of my essays. It's hard to know where I lie on these things without any feedback. Let me know and I can either post it on here, or email it to you! I appreciate any feedback, thanks!!!

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Hey Everyone.....is anyone around that could look at and comment on practice essays in preparation for the GRE? I take it on Friday and would love comments or, "ratings" of my essays. It's hard to know where I lie on these things without any feedback. Let me know and I can either post it on here, or email it to you! I appreciate any feedback, thanks!!!

Helpful hints!

a. The essays are graded in, literally, seconds.
b. The strongest correlate of score is length.
c. No one really cares about your writing score anyway, so long as you don't bomb it, and you have to do really really badly to bomb it.

In my opinion it's not really worth devoting much time to preparing for the essays. Write your intro and conclusion first so it looks like you have sone structure, then writewritewritewrite nonstop. That was my plan, I got a 5.5 and my essays were prettymuch drivel.

:)
 
I've heard you're guaranteed at least a 3 or so if you do the five paragraph format.
 
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That's nice to hear....I consider myself a *fairly* competent and speedy writer, so I have not spent much time preparing for these essays. Obviously, since I take my test on Friday, and here it is Wednesday night at 10:00 and I've written my first two!! I also can type really fast, and since I've heard that your score is positively correlated with length, I figure I can't do too bad.

I'm much more nervous for the Verbal and Quant.....I should be fine though. If not, I have time to re-take it! :)
 
Helpful hints!

a. The essays are graded in, literally, seconds.
b. The strongest correlate of score is length.
c. No one really cares about your writing score anyway, so long as you don't bomb it, and you have to do really really badly to bomb it.

In my opinion it's not really worth devoting much time to preparing for the essays. Write your intro and conclusion first so it looks like you have sone structure, then writewritewritewrite nonstop. That was my plan, I got a 5.5 and my essays were prettymuch drivel.

:)

Much agreed. I spoke with a GRE course instructor who also scores the writing section and he stated that he takes around 5 seconds to score one writing sample. It's a joke.

I received a 5 and quite frankly, I think I was off-topic. I was really just rambling on about nothing in particular while writing down all the formulas for the quant section.
 
Much agreed. I spoke with a GRE course instructor who also scores the writing section and he stated that he takes around 5 seconds to score one writing sample. It's a joke.

I received a 5 and quite frankly, I think I was off-topic. I was really just rambling on about nothing in particular while writing down all the formulas for the quant section.

Hahahahahahhahahhahahaha
 
Yes, GRE essays are somewhat of a joke..

First time I took the GRE last year, I got a 5.0 and I compared and contrasted Nsync and Oprah. Somehow it was relevant to the essay prompt haha..

Last week when i retook it, I got the same essay prompt haha. But I didn't write the same essay, mostly bc I couldn't remember it. I predict I'll get a 5 tho.
 
I just want to second JockNerd's advice-- concentrate on LENGTH. The first time I wrote the test, I wrote two well-planned and thought-out 5 paragraph essays (intro, three content paragraphs, conclusion). My score was either 3.5 or 4.0; I can't quite remember-- but whichever it was, I scored in the 32th percentile.

Since a few of my programs of interest had percentile cut-offs for all three sections of the GRE, I took the test again. This time I wrote two less well-thought-out eight paragraph essays. I scored a 6.
 
ETS when scoring the writing section look for few important aspects of your essay, which includes


  • ability to express ideas clearly and effectively
  • How you argue the idea and provide example
  • Flow of the contents should be straight.
  • standard written English
Taking few practice test will help you understand the flow and how to write and what to expect. Good Luck
 
My essays my last retake were absolutely horrible and I got a 4.5, so yeah.
 
ETS when scoring the writing section look for few important aspects of your essay, which includes


  • ability to express ideas clearly and effectively
  • How you argue the idea and provide example
  • Flow of the contents should be straight.
  • standard written English
Taking few practice test will help you understand the flow and how to write and what to expect. Good Luck

.... yeah, no. ETS likes to say that, but if you read above you'll see that the only things that matter are length and basic grasps of the English language and essay structure. It's kind of hard to assess clear expression and flow when a paper is graded in 18 seconds.
 
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