How well you accomplish this task dictates how well you’ll do on the Issue essay.įortunately, ETS is very up front about what specific benchmarks Issue essays need to meet to reach each score level. For your essay to score highly, you’ll need a clear thesis statement presenting your point of view and multiple examples that back up your claims. The Analyze an Issue task on GRE Writing asks test takers to read a statement about an issue, take a position, and develop and support that position with evidence and reasoning. But we believe PrepScholar is the best GRE prep program available right now, especially if you find it hard to organize your study schedule and don't know what to study.Ĭlick here to learn how you can improve your GRE score by 7 points, guaranteed. You don't NEED a prep program to get a great GRE score.
#Free gre essay grader how to
Not sure what to study? Confused by how to improve your score? We give you minute by minute guide. Quick side note: we've created the world's leading online GRE prep program that adapts to you and your strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if you got a 4/6 on the Issues essay but a 5/6 on the Argument essay, your total GRE Analytical Writing score would be 4.5. To get this number, your scores on the Issue and Argument task are averaged together to give you a final Analytical Writing score on a scale of 0-6 (with 0.5 increments). So if you tried to sneak an off-topic essay by the e-rater, it would be caught by the human grader and a second human grader would be brought in. Even if the human grader scored your essay way higher than the e-rater, you’d still end up with two human graders.Īfter both of your essays have been scored by e-rater and human grader(s), your overall GRE Writing score is then calculated. However, if the two scores do not “closely agree,” then a second human is brought in to grade and the final score is the average of the two human-assigned scores. If the human and computer graders “closely agree,” then the average of their two scores is the score you receive for that essay task. Because it’s pretty difficult to write a program that can judge an essay based on content, it’s possible you could fool the e-rater with a long off-topic essay that uses high-level vocabulary.īut that’s where the human essay graders come in. Your essay is next sent through the e-rater, which is described on the GRE website as “a computerized program developed by ETS that is capable of identifying essay features related to writing proficiency.” The e-rater program likely grades essays on quantifiable metrics like level of vocabulary difficulty, sentence structure, length of essay (word count and number of paragraphs), and so on. Instead, you’ll be graded on the overall quality of your essays. The scale used for essay scoring is holistic, which means you won’t automatically get points off after a certain number of errors. Each essay (analyze an issue and analyze an argument) is first graded by a trained human grader on a scale of 1-6.
The GRE essay scoring process is a little complicated because it involves both human and computer graders. In this article, we’ll explain the details of the GRE essay scoring process and the rubrics used by the human graders to derive your two essay scores.įeature image credit: Seems Legit – panel 3 of 6/used under CC BY-SA 4.0/Cropped and resized from original. But how does a human grade the essay? Is the computer grader trustworthy? Your GRE Writing score is a kind of cyborg measurement that averages together both human and machine ratings and melds them into an Analytical Writing score on a scale of 0-6.