The GRE Issue and Argument essays don’t have to be laborious. It’s relatively easy to achieve a high score with good time management, a solid template, and a little hard practice. Looking to add .5 to 1 extra point on top of your score? Follow these 5 easy tips to take your GRE essays to the next level!

1. Be forceful. Avoid any kind of wishy-washy qualifying language in your Issue and Argument essays. Your tone needs to be forceful, confident, like an expert’s. Remove words like “could be”, “might be”, “perhaps”, “maybe”, etc. from your essay when you proofread. Go through scholarly business articles and/or other students’ successful GRE AWA essays, and highlight phrases that particularly stand out to you as impressive, well-wrought, and cogent. Make a list of your favorites and try to incorporate them when appropriate in your own essays. Don’t shoehorn them in if the essay really doesn’t call for it, but the act of even researching and putting together such a list will really get you headed in the right direction!

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2. Keep it in third-person. There’s no easier way to sound less self-assured than to pepper your essays with “I think”’s and “I believe”’s. Of course you believe it, you’re the one writing the essay! Referring to yourself does not add anything to the essay and distracts the reader from your argument. Keep the focus on the points you are trying to make. If you would like to use an example incident from your own life, then by all means

3. Use strong transitions. You will need to steer the reader from paragraph to paragraph while always holding the thread of your argument together. The best way to do this is to use good transition words and phrases. Try to beef up these words and avoid common clichés. If you are just beginning to practice, it’s better to be clear and use words like “firstly…” and “secondly…” when you set up a transition rather than have no transitions at all, but as you get better at GRE AWA, try to mix it up.

4. Control your sentence structure. Sometimes longer just isn’t better. Be wary of your sentence structure meandering out of your control and getting wordy, redundant, or just plain pedantic. Especially if English is your second language, it will behoove you to keep your sentences on the shorter side. Don’t get so lost in the description of your example that you forget to clarify how it supports your position. It’s better to be succinct and forceful than prove you have an extensive vocabulary but lose sight of your argument.

5. Stay away from rhetorical questions. Don’t be tempted to start your essay with a question. It’s cliché and is often overused. Rhetorical questions just never sound as good on paper as they do in speech, and can give the impression that you don’t really know what you are talking about. Especially avoid this in your introduction and conclusion.

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The AWA section of the GRE is made up of two essays – the Argument essay, and the Issue essay. Each essay will be given two independent scores, but the scores are averaged into one score from 0 to 6. According to ETS, this is done because “it is more reliable than a score for either task alone.” The final score will be in half-point increments. For example, if you receive a 5 on the Argument essay, and a 6 on the Issue essay, your score will be a 5.5.

The readers of AWA are extremely familiar with the “look” of the graded GRE essays for each of the possible prompts, so they “know” ahead of time what a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 essay should “look like.” You will receive “NS” or no score, if you do not type any text. You will receive 0 if you write in a foreign language, or completely off-task.

According to the official ETS rubric, the highest scoring essays (those given a 5.5 or a 6) demonstrate: “insightful, in-depth analysis… logically compelling reasons and/or highly persuasive examples…is well organized; skillfully uses sentence variety and precise vocabulary to convey meaning effectively; demonstrates superior facility with sentence structure and language usage, but may have minor errors that do not interfere with meaning.” This means that they are not looking for perfection – obviously within 30 minutes you may have some spelling and grammar errors (and that’s okay!).

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The main qualities that the readers look for are the organization of your ideas, the quality of the ideas themselves, the strength and relevance of the examples, and your grasp of standard written English. Readers are trained to take non-native speakers’ abilities into account when grading so that scores are fair.

Below is the official AWA Scoring Percentile ranking from ETS. You can see that a score of 5 places you in the 87^st percentile. It’s quite plausible to achieve such a high score!

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