Download AWA Essay PPTX - Free GRE GMAT Class

How to Excel AWA, bringing the research
simplified to the students of GMAT, GRE & TOEFL
By
Satyadhar Joshi
[email protected]
http://www.freegregmatclass.com/
http://onlineclasses.nanotechbiz.org/
Contents of Plan
 What is E rater
 How to optimize you score
 Research on the structure of e rater
 Basic errors of grammar derived from GMAT
 Minimizing errors using critical reading of your own
essay
 Building basic Pre-knowledge
 Sample Essays
 Conclusion
http://www.ets.org/research/capabilities/automated_scoring
www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/awintro.pdf
Scoring Graph for GRE
http://www.powerscore.com/gre/help/scoringscale.cfm
Three Domains
E-Rater
2. Grammar and Punctuations
3. Extra Idioms and examples
1.
Nova GRE AW is similar to GMAT
Grammar
 Punctuations
 Usage
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Pronoun Errors
Subject Verb Agreement
Misplaced Modifiers
Faulty Parallelism
Faulty verb tense
Idioms
Punctuations (you need to know)
 Commas
 Semi colons
 Dashes
 Apostrophes
 Sentence fragmentation
 Run on Sentence
Usages Examples
 Pronoun Error
 Subject verb agreement
 Misplaced modifiers
 Faulty parallelism
 Faulty verb tense
 Faulty Idiom
Misplaced modifiers
Introduction to E-rater (GRE-GMAT)
 It’s a software developed by ETS
 It is used to rate Essays
 Very sophisticated techniques used
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4.
The E-rater favors transitional words
Ordinal numbers that introduce examples or reasons: first, second,
third, first of all, etc.
Transitional words that relate each sentence to other: since, because,
therefore, thus, etc.
Mood words that indicate the author's position: fail, ignore,
overestimate, underestimate, exaggerate, misrepresent, overlook, etc.
Counter-evidence indicators: actually, despite, admittedly, except,
even though, nonetheless, nevertheless, although, however, in spite of,
do, does, may, might, etc.
Some experts advice that:
to use transitional words
(ii) to include a topic sentence in every paragraph
(iii) that the e-rater is very sensitive to spelling and grammatical
mistakes (contrary to the real GRE) and
(iv) is not sensitive at all to the intuition of your writing and to the
organization of your essay (e.g. the e-rater never identified my
main point).
Taking all these into consideration I took one more test and
guess what.... 6/6 although my ideas where a little bid stupid,
my examples where out of place and the e-rater did not identify
any main idea in my essays. Just I had to take care to give a
LENGTHY and free of mistakes essay.
(i)
Length
 First note that your essay will be graded by an e-rater, which
is software that checks your essay for structural keywords
and overall organization. Then it will be graded by a human
grader who has about 2 minutes to read each essay.
 According to Princeton Review "Cracking the GMAT," more
length is better to get a high score from the e-rater (software
that ). However 800score suggests that going on and on will
irritate the human grader. I have read in a number of places
that 300-500 words is a good length.
Criterion (ETS)
 The Criterion® Online Writing Evaluation service provides
instructors and students with reliable evaluations of Englishlanguage essays.
 It delivers immediate score reporting and diagnostic
feedback that students can use to revise and resubmit their
essays.
 Instructors can use their own topics or select from the
Criterion topic library of more than 400 essay assignments at
various skill levels.
http://www.ets.org/criterion
Controversial Areas pertaining to Essay
 Human vs. Machine
 It does not assess specific content knowledge
 ETS Essay-Similarity-Detection Software
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/awintro.pdf
Essay writing has these basic functions
 Grammar
 Content (Examples related to the essay)
 Critical Reasoning
 Idioms
 Punctuation
 Triggering words
 Arguments and counter arguments
ETS says:
EST further says:
Evaluating Multiple Aspects of
Coherence in Student Essays
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N04/N04-1024.pdf
Exploring the Feedback and Revision Features of Criterion
Yigal Attali ETS, Princeton, NJ
Paper presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education
Summary
 Relation of length to grade
 Critique, is comprised of a suite of programs that evaluates and
provides feedback for errors in grammar, usage, and
mechanics, identifies the essay’s discourse structure, and
recognizes undesirable stylistic features
 The writing analysis tools identify five main types of
grammar, usage, and mechanics errors – agreement errors,
verb formation errors, wrong word use, missing punctuation,
and typographical errors.
http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf
Types of error
http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf
Grammar Errors
http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf
Three main errors in Grammar
 Be very careful about fragmented sentences.
 Possessive errors of vs. ’s
 Subject Very Agreement
 Garbled sentences
Usage Errors in Essay
Style Errors
Devastating errors
Below are the ranking of most costly errors which can take
your score down:
1. Garbled sentences
2. Repetition of words
3. Missing Apostrophe
4. Fused Words
5. Capital Nouns
6. Inappropriate use of words or phases
Garbled Words
 I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty unesdnatnrd waht I was
rdgnieg>The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid
aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at > Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it
deosn't mattaer in whaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed
it wouthit a porbelm.
Framing of Paragraph
 First and last lines are important
 Conveying words are important use all of them
 Idioms are important
 Paragraphs should have sentences of good length
 Writing strategy must includes an introductory paragraph, at least
a three-paragraph body with each paragraph in the body consisting
of a pair of main point and supporting idea elements, and a
concluding paragraph.
 Missing elements could include supporting ideas for up to the
three expected main points or a missing introduction, conclusion,
or main point. On the other hand, identification of main points
beyond the minimum three would not contribute to the score.
Using pre-knowledge
 Examples are important
 One area of each examples that the E-rater understand
Idioms
 Lexicon complexity is an important parameter, use as many
good words as possible
Book: Chandresh Agrawal, CAT Priyanka Prakshan
Punctuations
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One of the most important area of Essays
Comma (series, introduction, clauses, interjections,
conjunction)
Use of comma with transition words
Helps in avoided choppy sentences
Semi Colons: To join two independent clauses, to separate
items in series
Page 508 of Book: Nova’s GRE
Style
 Transition
 Figurative language
 Dictions
Arsenals for cases & Examples
 Science
 Philosophy
 Arts
 Politics
Pre-knowledge on USA
 Areas to Quote examples in Essay can be:
 American freedom History:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States
George Washington ( the first president of USA), current Barack
Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington
Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States
from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully
led the country through the American Civil War, and ended slavery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, leader in the
African American civil rights movement. Worked for civil rights in the
United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods
following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
Scientist
 Thomas Alva Edison (American; Bulb, camera, etc)
 Sergey M. Brin & Lawrence E. Page(Google)
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton (English)
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan
 Genetics and evolution are most topics: Charles Darwin
 Big Bang
Artists
 Michelangelo (Italy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo
 Pablo Picasso (France)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso
 Leonardo da Vinci (Italy) Painter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwell
Politics & Wars
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union
 Benito Mussolini (World War 2)
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Wales
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa
 World is Flat: Thomas Friedman
Economics
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yuan
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
 World Bank and International Monetary Fund
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
Sample Essay Content
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"Societies should try to save every plant and animal species,
regardless of the expense to humans in effort, time, and financial
well-being.”
PETA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_for_the_Ethical_Tre
atment_of_Animals
Kyoto Protocol
Global Warming & Carbon Tax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Fund_for_Nat
ure WWF
Framing/ Grammar/ Punctuations / etc will reduce marks
GRE Analytical Writing ISSUE Essay
Topic – 72 (ETS)
 "The true value of a civilization is reflected in its artistic
creations rather than in its scientific accomplishments.“
 All planning will help you
A few of GRE Analytical Writing ISSUES
& Essay Topics (source ETS)
 "Most societies do not take their greatest thinkers seriously, even when
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they claim to admire them.”
"The best ideas arise from a passionate interest in commonplace things."
"It is more important to allocate money for immediate, existing social
problems than to spend it on long-term research that might help future
generations.“
"A nation should require all its students to study the same national
curriculum until they enter college rather than allow schools in different
parts of the nation to determine which academic courses to offer.“
"The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to
analyze the trends of its youth.“
“When someone achieves greatness in any field — such as the arts,
science, politics, or business — that person’s achievements are more
important than any of his or her personal faults.”
http://www.testpreppractice.net/GRE/awa-samples/gre-awa-essay-samples.html
More topics
 It is necessary for everyone to read poetry, novels, mythology and
other types of imaginative literature.
 Academic disciplines have become so specialized in recent years
that scholars' ideas reach only a narrow audience. Until scholars
can reach a wider audience, their ideas will have little use.
 Governments must ensure that their major cities receive the
financial support they need in order to thrive, because it is
primarily in cities that a nation's cultural traditions are preserved
and generated.
 All nations should help support the development of a global
university designed to engage students in the process of solving
the world's most persistent social problems.
The Argument Essay
 Argument in the official test bank contains 3-5 major logical fallacies
1.
2.
3.
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1.
2.
Drawing an unfair analogy (ignoring relevant dissimilarities between
two things when comparing them)
Generalizing from particulars (relying on a small number of particular
cases — too small to reach a reliable general conclusion)
Confusing chronology with causation (because one event occurs after
another, the earlier event caused the later event)
Go for breadth, not depth.
what additional information is needed to better evaluate the
argument, and/or
what additional evidence (facts) would serve to strengthen the
argument.
http://majortests.com/gre/argument.php
Argument (GRE Barrons)
 Identify claims
 Question the claims
 Write body
 And introduction and summary at the last
 Re Read and revise
Inductive vs Deductive Logic
 Generalization
 Analogy
 Causal Reasoning
Logical Fallacies
 Contradiction
 Equivocation
 Circular Reasoning
 Shifting the Burdon of Proof
 Unwarranted assumption
 Appeal to authority
 Personal Attack
 True but irrelevant
Structure
 Restate
 Assumption
 Never address
 Omits important evidence
 Conclusion
Support Signaling words
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For example
For instance
Let me illustrate
Such as
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Additional reason
Additionally
Also
Furthermore
In Addition
Likewise
Moreover
Contrast Signaling words
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Although
But
Despite
Even though
Except
However
In Contrast
In Spite of
Nevertheless
On the contrary
On the other hand
Rather than
Cause and effect signal words
 Accordingly
 Consequently
 For this reason
 In conclusion
 So .. That
 In summary
Arguments
 All the arguments will be seriously flawed.You will lose
marks if you do not identify the major faults. The main
categories of logical error that you should be able to spot are:
Generalizations
1. Problems with surveys and statistics
2. False causes
3. False analogies
4. Hidden assumptions
5. Inadequate authority
Common logical fallacies
 Inductive fallacies
 Hasty generations
 Unrepresented facts
Reasoning Flaws (Logical Fallacies)
 Confused Cause and Effect reasoning
 Weak correlation
 Temporary and time being effect ie with time things have
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remained the same
Weak analogy
Unrepresentative statistical sample
Tainted sources
Certain condition is necessary for certain output
Certain things apply to each group vs apply from one to all
Essay analysis: Brain storming
 Prons and Cons
Use scratch paper
 Yes that is another arrow in the quiver
Many problems of modern society cannot be solved by laws and the legal system because moral behavior
cannot be legislated.
 It is true that many problems of modern society cannot be solved by laws, as moral behavior is something for
which a person has to be responsible himself. Although there are some problems that can be solved by laws,
other problems like moral behavior have to be solved by the persons themselves.
It is a persons responsibility to judge his behavior and follow the rules formed for the welfare of the society.
Law cannot punish every person for his or her behavior. For example, to save water or not to waste water is
the moral responsibility of every member of a society. Any law cannot punish an individual for such behavior.
In the first look, it does not seem to be a big harm to the society but in the end, he is wasting a precious
thing. Similarly, the behaviors like throwing plastic in public or spitting in public places is certainly not good
behavior. Laws can do little to stop these behaviors. However, there are countries where there are laws to
punish a person who does not behave properly in public places.
Similarly, with the invention of internet, there are more and more of cyber crimes where it is difficult to find
a witness. A person can easily hide his identity, his name, sex, address on the internet. Hence, it becomes
very difficult for law to punish the criminal. Although now a days, lawmakers have also found the ways to
identify these persons. However, here again, moral behavior can play a role in reducing these kind of crimes.
However, we cannot underestimate the importance of laws in our life. We need laws to protect ourselves and
punish those who harm the society. Law helps in balancing the society to be more harmonious and peaceful.
Although moral behavior cannot be legislated, thorough enforcement of a few laws can help to solve social
problems to some extent. Laws teach people many things about moral behavior and force them to follow
those rules. If everyone conforms to laws, it would be very easy for everyone to get rid of social problems.
Still, there are people who find it difficult to follow the laws. Then for these types of people, there should be
strict punishments. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to live in the society. Only enactment of stringent laws
can protect everyone in the society from the problems caused by the non-moral behavior of a few persons.
To make our society, we have to instill good values in the society at the school and college levels. It will help
to teach the students a subject related to moral behavior in their schools and colleges. This will help in
reducing problems related to moral behavior.
Hence, although moral behavior cannot be legislated, laws have to be there to curb the problems arising out
of immoral behavior. The society and laws have to work hand-in-hand to solve the problems of the modern
society and to make our society peaceful.

Publication Referred

Tetreault, J. & Chodorow, M. (2008). The ups and downs of prepositional error detection in ESL
writing (PDF). In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 865872). Manchester, UK: COLING 2008 Organizing Committee.

Tetreault, J., & Chodorow, M. (2008, August). Native judgments of non-native usage: Experiments
in preposition error detection (PDF). In COLING 2008: Proceedings of the workshop on Human
Judgements in Computational Linguistics (pp. 24-32). Manchester, UK: COLING 2008 Organizing
Committee.

Chodorow, M., Tetreault, J., & Han, N-R. (2007). Detection of grammatical errors involving
prepositions (PDF). In Proceedings of the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions (pp. 25-30).
Prague, Czech Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Higgins, D., & Burstein, J. (2006). Sentence similarity measures for essay coherence (PDF). In
Proceedings of the seventh international workshop on computational semantics (IWCS-7), Tilburg, The
Netherlands.

Burstein, J., & Higgins, D. (2005). Advanced capabilities for evaluating student writing: Detecting
off-topic essays without topic-specific training (PDF). In Proceedings of the international conference on
artificial intelligence in Education, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Attali,Y. (2004, April). Exploring the feedback and revision features of Criterion (PDF). Paper presented
at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education, San Diego, CA.
Publication Referred continued
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Han, N-R., Chodorow, M., & Leacock, C. (2004). Detecting errors in English article usage with a
maximum entropy classifier trained on a large, diverse corpus (PDF). In Proceedings of the 4th
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal: European Language
Resources Association.
Higgins, D., Burstein, J., Marcu, D., & Gentile, C. (2004). Evaluating multiple aspects of coherence
in student essays (PDF). In S. Dumais, D. Marcu, & S. Roukos (Eds.), HLT-NAACL 2004: Main
Proceedings (pp. 185-192). Boston, MA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Burstein, J., Chodorow, M., & Leacock, C. (2003, August). Criterion: Online essay evaluation: An
application for automated evaluation of student essays (PDF). Proceedings of the fifteenth annual
conference on innovative applications of artificial intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico. (This paper received an
AAAI Deployed Application Award.)
Burstein, J., & Wolska, M. (2003, April). Toward evaluation of writing style: Finding overly
repetitive word use in student essays (PDF). In Proceedings of the 10th conference of the European chapter
of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary.
Burstein, J., Marcu, D., Andreyev, S., & Chodorow, M. (2001, July). Towards automatic
classification of discourse elements in essays (PDF). In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 98-105). Toulouse, France: Association for
Computational Linguistics.
Leacock, C., & Chodorow, M. (2001). Automatic assessment of vocabulary usage without negative evidence
(TOEFL® Research Rep. No. 67, ETS RR-01-21). Princeton, NJ: ETS.
Youtube Series
 Intro
 Punctuation and grammar
 Extra knowledge
 Idioms & Phrases
 Review of some topics from GRE Pool
Books
 Book: Nova’s GRE
 Barron’s GRE
Resources on internet
 http://www.urch.com/forums/gmat-awa/50851-6-0-my-
awa-experience.html