GRE Analytical Writing cheat sheet

Task: 30 minutes, one prompt chosen from the two offered; the essay is scored holistically on a 0-6 scale, reported in half-point increments, and averaged with the Analyze an Argument score.

A 6 essay sustains a clear position on the issue's complexity, develops it with compelling, well-chosen examples, and controls language with varied, precise sentences and few errors.

A 5 essay is coherent and well developed but may be less insightful or less tightly controlled than a 6; a 4 is competent, adequate, and generally clear but thin or uneven.

A 3 essay shows some competence but is seriously limited: vague, poorly organized, or thin development; a 2 is seriously flawed and weak in analysis; a 1 is fundamentally deficient.

Zero is reserved for responses that are blank, off-topic, copied from the prompt, unreadable, or written in a language other than English; the ETS reader cannot score these.

The prompt's instruction clause (e.g., 'discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree') is part of the task; ignoring it caps the score regardless of prose quality.

Scoring is by trained readers using a published rubric, not by machine keyword matching; length alone does not raise a score, but very short essays cannot show the required development.

Time budget rule: roughly 3-5 minutes planning, 20-22 minutes drafting, and 3-5 minutes proofreading, with a target of 4-6 paragraphs and 500-700 words.

The issue prompts are drawn from a published pool of roughly 150+ topics covering education, technology, government, arts, and society; the pool is public, so prompts can be practiced in advance.

Position rule: a qualified or nuanced thesis ('agree in part, because X but not Y') usually scores higher than a flat agree/disagree, because it demonstrates engagement with complexity.

Concession-then-rebuttal structure: state the strongest opposing view fairly, then show its limits; this raises the analysis score more reliably than stacking one-sided examples.

Evidence hierarchy: specific, verifiable examples (named events, studies, historical cases) outrank hypotheticals, which outrank generic assertions; invented statistics are a liability.

Each body paragraph should make one claim, support it with a concrete example, and explicitly link the example back to the thesis; unsupported topic sentences read as assertion, not argument.

Counterexample test: if a single plausible case would refute your thesis as stated, narrow the thesis with a condition rather than defending an indefensible absolute.

Avoid absolutes ('always', 'never', 'all people') unless the prompt itself uses them; absolute claims invite the reader to find a counterexample and weaken the score.

Transition rule: every paragraph's first sentence should signal its relation to the previous one (however, moreover, a second consideration, the deeper problem), not merely announce a new topic.