How to Excel AWA, bringing the research simplified to the students of GMAT, GRE & TOEFL : By
Satyadhar Joshi
shivgan3@yahoo.com
http://www.wiziq.com/shivgan_joshi How to Excel AWA, bringing the research simplified to the students of GMAT, GRE & TOEFL
Contents of Plan : 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 www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/awintro.pdf http://www.ets.org/research/capabilities/automated_scoring
Scoring Graph for GRE : Scoring Graph for GRE http://www.powerscore.com/gre/help/scoringscale.cfm
Introduction to E-rater (GRE-GMAT) : Introduction to E-rater (GRE-GMAT) It’s a software developed by ETS
It is used to rate Essays
Very sophisticated techniques used
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: : Some experts advice that: to use transitional words
to include a topic sentence in every paragraph
that the e-rater is very sensitive to spelling and grammatical mistakes (contrary to the real GRE) and
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.
Length : 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) : Criterion (ETS) The Criterion® Online Writing Evaluation service provides instructors and students with reliable evaluations of English-language 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 : 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 : 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: : ETS says:
EST further says: : EST further says:
Evaluating Multiple Aspects of Coherence in Student Essays : 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 CriterionYigal Attali ETS, Princeton, NJPaper presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education : Exploring the Feedback and Revision Features of CriterionYigal Attali ETS, Princeton, NJPaper 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 : Types of error http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf
Grammar Errors : Grammar Errors http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf
Three main errors in Grammar : 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 : Usage Errors in Essay
Style Errors : Style Errors
Devastating errors : Devastating errors Below are the ranking of most costly errors which can take your score down:
Garbled sentences
Repetition of words
Missing Apostrophe
Fused Words
Capital Nouns
Inappropriate use of words or phases
Garbled Words : 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 : 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.
Slide 22 :
Using pre-knowledge : Using pre-knowledge Examples are important
One area of each examples that the E-rater understand
Idioms : Idioms Lexicon complexity is an important parameter, use as many good words as possible Book: Chandresh Agrawal, CAT Priyanka Prakshan
Punctuations : Punctuations 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 Page 508 of Book: Nova’s GRE
Style : Style Transition
Figurative language
Dictions
Pre-knowledge on USA : Pre-knowledge on USA Areas to Quote examples in Essay can be:
American freedom History
George Washington ( the first president of USA), current Barack Obama
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.
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.
Scientist : 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
Charles Darwin
Big Bang
Artists : Artists Michelangelo (Italy)
Pablo Picasso (France)
Leonardo da Vinci (Italy) Painter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwell USA
Politics & Wars : 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 : 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 : Sample Essay Content "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_Treatment_of_Animals
Kyoto Protocol
Global Warming & Carbon Tax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Fund_for_Nature WWF
Framing/ Grammar/ Punctuations / etc will reduce marks
GRE Analytical Writing ISSUE Essay Topic – 72 (ETS) : 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) : A few of GRE Analytical Writing ISSUES & Essay Topics (source ETS) "Most societies do not take their greatest thinkers seriously, even when 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 : 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.
Publication Referred : 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. 865-872). 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 : Publication Referred continued 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.
Books : Books Book: Nova’s GRE
Barron’s GRE
Resources on internet : Resources on internet http://www.urch.com/forums/gmat-awa/50851-6-0-my-awa-experience.html