Overview of the Analytical Writing Section

The Analytical Writing section tests your critical thinking and analytical writing skills. It assesses your
ability to articulate and support complex ideas, construct and evaluate arguments, and sustain a focused and
coherent discussion. It does not assess specific content knowledge.
The Analytical Writing section consists of two separately-timed analytical writing tasks:
 a 30-minute "Analyze an Issue" task
 a 30-minute "Analyze an Argument" task
The Issue task presents an opinion on an issue of broad interest followed by specific instructions on how to
respond to that issue. You are required to evaluate the issue, considering its complexities, and develop an
argument with reasons and examples to support your views.
The Argument task presents a different challenge from that of the Issue task: it requires you to evaluate a
given argument according to specific instructions. You will need to consider the logical soundness of the
argument rather than to agree or disagree with the position it presents.
The two tasks are complementary in that one requires you to construct your own argument by taking a
position and providing evidence supporting your views on the issue, whereas the other requires you to
evaluate someone else's argument by assessing its claims and evaluating the evidence it provides.
Preparing for the Analytical Writing Section
Everyone—even the most practiced and confident of writers—should spend some time preparing for the
Analytical Writing section before arriving at the test center. It is important to review the skills measured,
how the section is scored, scoring guides and score level descriptions, sample topics, scored sample essay
responses, and reader commentary.
The tasks in the Analytical Writing section relate to a broad range of subjects—from the fine arts and
humanities to the social and physical sciences—but no task requires specific content knowledge. In fact,
each task has been field-tested to ensure that it possesses several important characteristics, including the
following:
 GRE test takers, regardless of their field of study or special interests, understood the task and
could easily respond to it.
 The task elicited the kinds of complex thinking and persuasive writing that university faculty
consider important for success in graduate school.
 The responses were varied in content and in the way the writers developed their ideas.
To help you prepare for the Analytical Writing section of the revised General Test, the GRE Program has
published the entire pool of tasks from which your test tasks will be selected. You might find it helpful to
review the Issue and Argument pools. You can view the published pools on the Web at www.ets.org/gre.
Test-Taking Strategies for the Analytical Writing Section
It is important to budget your time. Within the 30-minute time limit for the Issue task, you will need to
allow sufficient time to consider the issue and the specific instructions, plan a response, and compose your
essay. Within the 30-minute time limit for the Argument task, you will need to allow sufficient time to
consider the argument and the specific instructions, plan a response, and compose your essay. Although
GRE readers understand the time constraints under which you write and will consider your response a first
draft, you still want it to be the best possible example of your writing that you can produce under the testing
conditions.
Save a few minutes at the end of each timed task to check for obvious errors. Although an occasional
spelling or grammatical error will not affect your score, severe and persistent errors will detract from the
overall effectiveness of your writing and thus lower your score.
How the Analytical Writing Section is Scored

Each response is holistically scored on a 6-point scale according to the criteria published in the GRE
Analytical Writing Scoring Guides (see pages 30 and 31). Holistic scoring means that each response is
judged as a whole: readers do not separate the response into component parts and award a certain number
of points for a particular criterion or element such as ideas, organization, sentence structure, or language.
Instead, readers assign scores based on the overall quality of the response, considering all of its
characteristics in an integrated way. Excellent organization or poor organization, for example, will be part
of the readers' overall impression of the response and will therefore contribute to the score, but
organization, as a distinct feature, receives no specific score.
In general, GRE readers are college and university faculty from a wide range of academic fields, who are
experienced in teaching courses in which writing and critical thinking skills are important. All GRE
readers have undergone careful training, passed stringent GRE qualifying tests, and demonstrated that they
are able to maintain scoring accuracy.
To ensure fairness and objectivity in scoring
 responses are randomly distributed to readers
 all identifying information about the test takers is concealed from the readers
 each response is scored by two readers
 readers do not know what other scores a response may have received
 the scoring procedure requires that each response receive identical or adjacent scores from two
readers; any other score combination is adjudicated by a third GRE reader
The scores given for the two tasks are then averaged for a final reported score. The score level
descriptions, presented on page 32, provide information about how to interpret the total score on the
Analytical Writing section. The primary emphasis in scoring the Analytical Writing section is on critical
thinking and analytical writing skills.
Your essay responses on the Analytical Writing section will be reviewed by ETS essay-similaritydetection
software and by experienced essay readers during the scoring process. In light of the high value
placed on independent intellectual activity within United States graduate schools and universities, ETS
reserves the right to cancel test scores of any test taker when there is substantial evidence that an essay
response includes, but is not limited to, any of the following:
 text that is substantially similar to that found in one or more other GRE essay responses;
 quoting or paraphrasing, without attribution, language or ideas that appear in published or
unpublished sources;
 unacknowledged use of work that has been produced through collaboration with others without
citation of the contribution of others;
 text submitted as work of the examinee when the ideas or words have, in fact, been borrowed from
elsewhere or prepared by another person.
When one or more of the above circumstances occurs, your essay, in ETS’s professional judgment, does
not reflect the independent, analytical writing skills that this test seeks to measure. Therefore, ETS must
cancel the essay score as invalid and cannot report the GRE General Test scores of which the essay score is
an indispensable part.
Test takers whose scores are cancelled will forfeit their test fees and must pay to take the entire GRE
General Test again at a future administration. No record of the score cancellation, or the reason for
cancellation, will appear on future score reports sent to colleges and universities.