Customer Reviews

Gmat-Cat : Answers to the Real Essay Questions

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Hey, let's face it--who is going to read 150 GMAT essays? Not me, maybe not you, maybe only a GMAT essay scorer. Most people can do fine with the samples included in the Official GMAT book or with the review included in other books.

Furthermore, most schools don't really care too much about your GMAT essay score--they care most about your Verbal and Quantitative scores. Most of the schools that really care about your writing ability will look at your answers to the essay questions in the MBA application.

However, if you are the kind of person who really, really *loves* to study as much as possible for a test, this book is good, *and*, it is the only book on the market with this many sample GMAT essays.

All the essays are well-written and they would receive high scores on the GMAT. This book is good for people who learn from examples or for people who really have no idea what to write. Non-native speakers of English should take a look at this book if they feel like their writing style is not similar to the English writing style.

In short, this book is full of examples and is good for people who are not sure of what to write. Since GMAT has said that all essays will come from these topics, studying this book is good for people who are nervous about their essay scores.

Very simply, this book is for two kinds of people: 1. People for whom English are not their first language or 2. People who don't read OR write formal documents in their workplace. The trick to the essay questions is pretty straightforward. Rather than reading essays that "worked", a person is better off reading the op/ed page in the New York Times and/or practicing what I would call the 5-paragraph rule. I used this (made-up) rule to get a 6 on the essay section with no preparation; (the essay is scored 1-6, 6 being the highest). Basically, the exam states a very simple statement, either ridiculously agreeable or ridiculously disagreeable. All you have to do is say why you agree/disagree with the statement. So what you can do is break it up as follows: paragraph 1 - State your opinions very clearly, e.g. I agree with this statement because of reason 1, reason 2 and reason 3. Paragraph 2 - Support reason 1, reason 1 makes sense because blah blah blah. Paragraph 3, same as the second paragraph. Paragraph 4 - optional, you don't need 3 reasons. I had 3 for one essay on 2 for the other. Paragraph 5 - wrap it up by re-iterating your reasons for agreeing/disagreeing with the statement, e.g. In conclusion, I agree with this statement because of reason 1, reason 2 etc. Voila! Practice this method with a couple of incredibly simple statements. It's more of how you structure the essays than the content. Remember that one of the two graders is a computer. Here is a practice statement: 1. Women were given the right to vote in the latter half of the 20th century. The presidents from this time period have caused more mass destruction than from the first half of the century. Thus, women should not have the right to vote. (Yes, some of the statements are this stupid.)

Very simply, this book is for two kinds of people: 1. People for whom English are not their first language or 2. People who don't read OR write formal documents in their workplace. The trick to the essay questions is pretty straightforward. Rather than reading essays that "worked", a person is better off reading the op/ed page in the New York Times and/or practicing what I would call the 5-paragraph rule. I used this (made-up) rule to get a 6 on the essay section with no preparation; (the essay is scored 1-6, 6 being the highest). Basically, the exam states a very simple statement, either ridiculously agreeable or ridiculously disagreeable. All you have to do is say why you agree/disagree with the statement. So what you can do is break it up as follows: paragraph 1 - State your opinions very clearly, e.g. I agree with this statement because of reason 1, reason 2 and reason 3. Paragraph 2 - Support reason 1, reason 1 makes sense because blah blah blah. Paragraph 3, same as the second paragraph. Paragraph 4 - optional, you don't need 3 reasons. I had 3 for one essay on 2 for the other. Paragraph 5 - wrap it up by re-iterating your reasons for agreeing/disagreeing with the statement, e.g. In conclusion, I agree with this statement because of reason 1, reason 2 etc. Voila! Practice this method with a couple of incredibly simple statements. It's more of how you structure the essays than the content. Remember that one of the two graders is a computer. Here is a practice statement: 1. Women were given the right to vote in the latter half of the 20th century. The presidents from this time period have caused more mass destruction than from the first half of the century. Thus, women should not have the right to vote. (Yes, some of the statements are this stupid.)

This book only covers the old questions .. it does not contain the latest 50 questions..and in the online publication, the author says its available in the next edition..but the cover of 2 nd edition says it has all 50 latest included list of essays..but it really does not!!..there is lot of contradition for students who have spent there dollars on this it is really DISAPPOINTING....IT WOULD BE BETTER IF THE AUTHOR CAN PUBLISH THE LATEST ESSAY ANSWERS IN THE WEBPAGE FOR DOWNLOAD...

I highly recommend this book if you want to maximize your GMAT AWA score. (And yes, AWA is not as important as the Q & V sections, but do you want people to think you're a lucky-guessing illiterate test monkey?)

This book helped me bag a perfect "6.0" on my GMAT essays recently. BUT NOTE: it *is* sufficient to buy a used copy of an older edition -- you don't need the newest one. I used the 1st edition from around 1998, that was fine.

You DO NOT need to read the book cover to cover. But do read at least 25 or 30 of the essays and pay attention. That will be excellent prep in showing you what a good essay is in terms of organization, length, rhetoric, etc. Well worth a few bucks and a few hours of prep time.

By reading this book you can really understand exactly what the examinators (including computer examinator) are expecting and looking for in a GMAT essay.
You must have your own writing skills, but this book can definitely help with the format and key-phrases.

Something you must know about ETS GMAT E-RATER before buying
this book :

ETS has a Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service, a Web-based
program for students seeking to practice writing. It combines
automated essay scoring with instructional feedback in basic
grammar, usage, style and organization.

According to the Educational Testing Service, 104,000
students and 2,700 teachers are using Criterion in 535
schools, primarily in the United States; four-fifths are
middle or high school students, and the remainder are at
colleges or universities. Such schools hope that Criterion
will help students improve their writing scores on
standardized tests, although some educators are not
convinced the technology will necessarily make them better
writers.

The automated essay scoring engine behind Criterion, called
e-rater, has been used to score more than 1.5 million
essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT,
in tandem with human readers. The machine score and the
human score are in agreement 97 percent to 98 percent of
the time.

"Our aim is that the system agrees with a human reader as
often as two human readers agree with each other," said
Jill Burstein, a computational linguist at the Educational
Testing Service and the leader of the team that developed
e-rater. "The goal is to simulate the human score."

E-rater cannot read or judge an essay's quality but uses
statistical analysis to determine which linguistic features

are characteristic of each human scoring level, typically
on a scale from 1 to 6.

For example, a high score almost always contains topically
relevant vocabulary, a variety of sentence structures, and
the use of cue terms like "in summary," for example, and
"because" to organize an argument. By analyzing 50 of these
features in a sampling of essays on a particular topic that
were scored by human beings, the system can accurately
predict how the same human readers would grade additional
essays on the same topic.

To develop a model, e-rater must be trained on 450 to 500
essay responses scored by two professional readers based on
a rigorous scoring guide. "If the human scoring is
inaccurate, e-rater will make an inaccurate judgment on the
writer," said Marisa Farnum, the writing assessment
specialist and product manager for Criterion at the testing
service. "It's only as good as the human scoring it learns
from."

A model can be developed for any type of writing that lends
itself to consistent, reliable scoring. "If you can get
human experts to agree, you can get the computer to do it,"
said Richard Swartz, the executive director of the testing
service research unit that developed Criterion. Typically
the system is used to grade only the expository or
persuasive topics that dominate standardized assessment.

The testing service recognizes that e-rater could yield a
high score on an essay with a well-written but illogical
argument. "Right now, e-rater looks at an essay like a bag
of words," Dr. Burstein said. "If you use the right words,
you could in theory get a good score without the argument
necessarily making sense, because it's not at this point
tracking a logical line of argumentation."

But Dr. Burstein points out that deliberately fooling the
system is unrealistic, given the time it takes to do so.
Normally, she said, test takers "give their best attempt at

what they can do, and then you get reasonable, reliable
results."

I scored a 6.0 using the aforementioned New York Times article
dated 4th September, 2003.

Now decide whether you really need the book ?

It offers a detailed and experienced view of how to deal with AWA questions in the GMAT. It includes proposed answers for each of the 180 questions of the GMAT AWA. Good advices, useful to make up an idea about how to face AWA in the GMAT

Everything said in the review is true. The answers are all there. Unfortunately answers are of little use without the questions. As explained in the review above, the questions can be downloaded from somewhere but where that somewhere is I do not know. The URL reference in the book is outdated, and the publisher (MacMillan) has stopped printing the book and hence all support. So if you like answers to unknown questions, go for it. Otherwise DON'T!

This is a excellent book. I would recommend this book for anyone who is not a native english speaker.