Physics GRE Discussion Forums

.

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

-Riley

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.

.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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?

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

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.

WhoaNonstop wrote:they all had memorized words, but were oblivious to what the words meant.

This part does not make sense.

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?

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.