Help: low analytical writing score

Post Reply
rims
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 9:10 pm

Help: low analytical writing score

Post by rims » Thu Nov 25, 2010 2:39 pm

.
Last edited by rims on Thu Feb 10, 2011 1:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
WhoaNonstop
Posts: 853
Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:31 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by WhoaNonstop » Thu Nov 25, 2010 6:50 pm

Most admission committees for physics use this as the most important criteria.

-Riley

schwiss
Posts: 108
Joined: Fri Aug 14, 2009 3:49 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by schwiss » Thu Nov 25, 2010 6:57 pm

WhoaNonstop wrote:Most admission committees for physics use this as the most important criteria.

-Riley
Well, I can say that I have never admitted a student with AW score that low.

rims
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 9:10 pm

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by rims » Thu Nov 25, 2010 7:26 pm

.
Last edited by rims on Thu Feb 10, 2011 1:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

schwiss
Posts: 108
Joined: Fri Aug 14, 2009 3:49 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by schwiss » Thu Nov 25, 2010 7:32 pm

I got 28 writing in TOEFL and 3.5 AW too, btw. I heard that AW is looking for a very standardized text. If you deviate, you lose points. Think about it: one of your graders is a machine. How much is it able to look at the actual content? Someone somewhere suggested it checks occurrences of some "analytical" words, the length of sentences, etc.

Edit: Oops, got 4.0 in AW. Still, practically the same.

CarlBrannen
Posts: 381
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 11:34 pm

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by CarlBrannen » Fri Nov 26, 2010 2:03 am

I got a 5.5 and wonder which of the two essays sabotaged my 6.0

For one of them, you were to write an essay on a subject. I basically wrote a complete essay on the techniques by which physics is taught. (I chose this because I heard somewhere that the schools get access to your essays. So I figured an essay on the most efficient techniques for the mass murder of college professors might not go over as well.) I included a title, abstract, and a reference. I thought that the weakness with this essay is that I only included one reference and too much of the essay depended on that reference. So it might have looked like copying, though if you actually looked up the citation it wasn't like that.

For the other, you were to criticize someone else's short essay. I typed a whole bunch of paragraphs for this with every argument I could think of. My feeling on it was that they were looking for "analytical" rather than "writing" so they wanted to know about your thinking process. And so a high scoring essay would be one that showed the most complete thinking out.

I should probably add that I type at an extremely high speed and I think that this is an important skill. One of my jobs over the years has been programming in VHDL (Very High-level Design Language). This is a very verbose language used to design digital hardware. One time a secretary complained to human resources about my typing - it basically sounds like someone practicing because in VHDL you have all these stock phrases that you repeat every time you do the smallest thing.

So I say practice typing. Try to reduce errors. Maybe organize your essay like a real paper. Probably come up with as many and as varied arguments about the subject as you can.

pymtab
Posts: 36
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 7:19 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by pymtab » Fri Nov 26, 2010 3:58 am

There are a few threads about admission results. It seems that UCSB so-do not enforce their 5.0 AW minimum. AW is known to matter very little in the hard sciences. More important is the Verbal, Quant, and Physics score.

By the way, we may want to see gradschoolshopper.com.
This is from stanford physics:
"Average GRE Scores for admitted students were verbal
635, quantitative–795; analytical–4.63; "

So they probably accepted a lot of people with 4.0.

User avatar
grae313
Posts: 2296
Joined: Tue May 29, 2007 8:46 pm

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by grae313 » Fri Nov 26, 2010 1:50 pm

Make sure to follow the links and read quizivex's story.

http://www.physicsgre.com/viewtopic.php ... al+writing

alfradthomas
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Nov 27, 2010 3:10 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by alfradthomas » Sat Nov 27, 2010 3:26 am

Should I be worried by low analytical writing score on GRE?can you help me ????

User avatar
WhoaNonstop
Posts: 853
Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:31 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by WhoaNonstop » Sun Nov 28, 2010 3:19 am

alfradthomas wrote:Should I be worried by low analytical writing score on GRE?can you help me ????
Seriously. I got a 4.0 on this. I'm not sure why everyone is worried about it. Are you convinced that a writing score will have that big of an effect in a physics application? I think that would be ridiculous. It could make a slight difference, but hardly a deal breaker.

- Riley

User avatar
satyad18
Posts: 233
Joined: Sun Jul 05, 2009 9:17 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by satyad18 » Sun Nov 28, 2010 3:52 am

WhoaNonstop wrote:
alfradthomas wrote:Should I be worried by low analytical writing score on GRE?can you help me ????
Seriously. I got a 4.0 on this. I'm not sure why everyone is worried about it. Are you convinced that a writing score will have that big of an effect in a physics application? I think that would be ridiculous. It could make a slight difference, but hardly a deal breaker.

- Riley
And 3.5 here!

hamadahoda007
Posts: 44
Joined: Tue Aug 10, 2010 10:05 pm

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by hamadahoda007 » Sun Nov 28, 2010 11:32 am

Having come to this topic, I would like to ask the most repeated question ever ! What about the Verbal Section? I reviewed all previous answers and checked all profiles and results, still don't know if I should apply to top 10 with that 440... Is it more/less important than the analytic part?

User avatar
WhoaNonstop
Posts: 853
Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:31 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by WhoaNonstop » Sun Nov 28, 2010 3:36 pm

hamadahoda007 wrote:Having come to this topic, I would like to ask the most repeated question ever ! What about the Verbal Section? I reviewed all previous answers and checked all profiles and results, still don't know if I should apply to top 10 with that 440... Is it more/less important than the analytic part?
I have met many graduate students who can barely speak English but scored very well on the Verbal part (600+). I spoke with them about this and they all had memorized words, but were oblivious to what the words meant. I hardly think this score is super important, unless you were really low. I received a similar score and I am still applying to a few top 10 schools because I feel this is not the most important thing on an application in physics.

-Riley

schwiss
Posts: 108
Joined: Fri Aug 14, 2009 3:49 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by schwiss » Sun Nov 28, 2010 5:34 pm

It's also very random. I had a difference of about 150 points between my highest powerprep test and the real one.

Edit: To clarify, I mean AW. 4.0 on the test and 154.0 with powerprep.

axiomofchoice
Posts: 198
Joined: Thu Feb 05, 2009 11:45 pm

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by axiomofchoice » Sun Nov 28, 2010 7:15 pm

WhoaNonstop wrote:they all had memorized words, but were oblivious to what the words meant.
This part does not make sense.

bernetta66
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:58 am

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by bernetta66 » Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:17 am

I also just got my GRE writing score back...and it was a 3.5. Crap. My other stats are good (770 V, 720 Q, 3.51 GPA) - will this stupid writing score will prevent my application from even being considered by certain MPH programs because of minimum cut-offs? Is it worth it to retake the GRE?

User avatar
InquilineKea
Posts: 301
Joined: Sun Mar 21, 2010 9:07 pm

Re: Help: low analytical writing score

Post by InquilineKea » Thu Jan 05, 2012 1:22 pm

pymtab wrote:There are a few threads about admission results. It seems that UCSB so-do not enforce their 5.0 AW minimum. AW is known to matter very little in the hard sciences. More important is the Verbal, Quant, and Physics score..
Do you have any sources on that? Writing research papers is an extremely important skill in the hard sciences. One may consider Analytical Writing to be overly formulaic, but frankly, scientific writing is also quite formulaic.



Post Reply