bkw wrote:lunarpower wrote:btw, david's advice in this thread is quite sound -- don't worry too much about the awa. you are much better off writing a 4-4.5 awa with essentially zero effort than writing a 6 awa with lots and lots of effort.
this is in fact the reason why the awa is scored separately from the rest of the test -- precisely because it just doesn't matter as much as the rest of the test.
Thanks for your reply Ron.
OK, I will try to lessen my effort on AWA, and spend max 20-30min for both and see how it goes.
wait, are you saying 20-30 minutes
combined?
that's a very bad idea -- if you are a non-native speaker of english and you only spend 10 to 15 min. writing the essays, then you may very well write an essay that is so incomplete that it earns a score of 1 or 2. in that case, the score definitely
will work against you.
i.e., it's not important that you score at the top of the AWA scoring scale, but you do have to write essays that avoid the lowest scores.
when i say "less effort", i'm not talking about spending less time writing the essays; i'm talking about
writing them in a way that is more routine, so that you don't have to use as much brainpower to write them.
i.e., you should try to develop some sort of template for writing the essay, so that, once you've picked your topic, you can just follow the template rather than having to construct the entire essay from scratch every time.
Do you suggest to do any CAT without the AWA for the sake of practice more Quant, pacing, Verbal, also to see how much difference the AWA makes?
oh dear, no.
you won't get an opportunity to "practice more quant and verbal" -- there will still be a total of 37 quant questions and 41 verbal questions, so you will still get exactly the same amount of practice and review.
and, ironically, "pacing" is exactly the reason why you should NEVER skip the awa section! if you skip the essays, then the entire overall timing of the exam will be completely different -- it will be over an hour shorter, and you will not have to deal with anywhere near the same amount of mental endurance/fatigue. in short, you won't be getting authentic practice for the exam.
write the exam every time.
get used to writing it.
the only way to make the essays more routine -- and, correspondingly, less effort -- is to practice writing them every time you take a practice test.
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.
--
Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron en castellano
Potete chiedere domande a Ron in italiano
On peut poser des questions à Ron en français
Voit esittää kysymyksiä Ron:lle myös suomeksi
--
Quand on se sent bien dans un vêtement, tout peut arriver. Un bon vêtement, c'est un passeport pour le bonheur.
Yves Saint-Laurent
--
Learn more about ron
