How to score that perfect 6.0 on GMAT AWA Essay Example for Free

How to score that perfect 6.0 on GMAT AWA Essay This guide is meant for essay-phobes who dread the blank screen with the blinking cursor and/or people who simply want to score well (or full) on the GMAT. As far as my qualifications are concerned, I recently gave the GMAT and with good confidence scored a full 6 on my GMAT AWA, despite being an essay-phobe myself. To get started, you should read Chineseburneds article on AWA Writing here -http://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-get-6-0-awa-my-guide-64327.html. The idea of his article is to form a template and it suggests some supporting words for you to use while writing your essay. This idea forms the meat of my strategy, and theres no point in me reproducing the material in this already well-known reference article. Also, note that the Issue essay has been discontinued much to my relief, and this guide will focus exclusively on the Argument essay. I actually waited a whole year so I could give the Next-Gen GMAT rather than the old GMAT with 2 essays, and I must say this pathetic strategy paid off 780 + 6 AWA + 8 IR on my first attempt. I do believe the Quant and Verbal scores would have been negatively affected due to the energy drain caused by the 2 essays. Im only going to build on the tips given by Chineseburned, add some more tips and make it EASIER for you to follow. Now that youve read the article, its time to jump into some more tricks: Three things to remember: 1) Remember that the argument essay is more science than art. You need to use connecting words to build up your argument. (Moreover, for example, to illustrate, ; do not use etc unless absolutely necessary, it looks like an open ending make your argument sound robust and confident) People suggest writing about 500 words per essay the reason being unless youre a good writer, its difficult to convey what you want to say minimally. Take a look at the score 6 essay in the Official Guide can you pull off an essay like that? If yes, you dont need this guide I should be taking tips from you. If you cant, read on. A good 500+ word essay usually shows that you can whip up ideas and write atleast well about your ideas in the 30 mins. Its also useful to remember that the GMAT asks for a draft version, not a very awesome finalized essay. So, a bit of structure, good grammar and 3 argument loopholes (2 or 4 is fine, but 3 is a good number to stick to) are all the things that you need to write your essay. 2) Its also useful to keep in mind that one of your raters is an algorithmic e-rater. You can test yourself against the official e-rater by buying the GMAT Write pack from mba.com. I did do this because I wasnt feeling too sure about my scores, and I feel more confident if I know what to expect beforehand. I do suggest you do the same, because its one thing to write an essay and another to see your actual score. The thing here is good structure and grammar with connecting words in a 500+ word essay is almost guaranteed to give you a 6 its how the e-rater seems to be programmed. On top of that, from what Ive read, the human graders seem to be so overburdened with essays to check that they too follow an algorithm almost the same as the e-rater; a longer essay is sure to score better than a shorter one. 3) Don’t worry about making too much sense in the essay. The e-rater can’t validate your facts and figures – it can only read structure. And the reader cannot verify any of them either – trust me, he doesn’t have the time or the inclination nor is he supposed to do so. All they need is structure, grammar and a well substantiated argument. Feel free to conjure examples out of thin air so long as they substantiate your argument. As I’ll explain later, the examples form the bulk of the essay. What does this mean for you? Aim for 500+ words and Im going to show you exactly how to do that. How to write a 500 word essay in 30 mins? After writing my first 2 essays, I realized I was finding it difficult to vomit 500+ pretty words in 30 mins I needed a shortcut. This section is organized in chronological order from a time management perspective. My time breakup was very simple – 1. Type out your template with full introduction and conclusion. Yes, I cheated. I had a 100+ word intro-conc template ready to vomit without even reading the question! And now I have conclusive proof that this strategy works! That should take approximately 3-4 minutes to type. Voila! No more blank screen ï Å , plus you’re free to attack the question and who cares if you even forget the template at this point? Here’s my template: (MS Word word count: 126) â€Å"The argument that omits some very important considerations that are necessary to get a full 360-degree view of the described scenario. The argument does not provide substantive evidence to be able to prove or even support the main conclusion from the given premises. First, the argument readily assumes that†¦ Second, the argument claims that†¦ Lastly, the argument fails to account for the fact that†¦ In summary, the argument is extremely flawed because of the above-mentioned reasons and hence comes across as weak and unconvincing to the reader. If the author had mentioned all the relevant facts that are essential to objectively assess the situation under consideration, the argument would have been much stronger. Without this information, the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.† I must mention that this was close to what I wrote on some of my first practice essays, which helped me memorize it easily. Whatever template you use, just remember to restate the argument in the introduction and keep the other parts independent of the actual argument. Dont fill in the part till the next step. Just mark it with a or whatever and come back to it after reading the question. 2. Now that you’ve typed out your template, take 3-4 mins to read the question and JOT DOWN 3 loopholes. Write them down on your scratchpad, do not memorize. 2B. Fill in the part in the introduction. 3. All that remains is for you to expand your points into 3 paragraphs which we already started in the template. You’ll need about 400 words. I found this difficult initially, but then, as usual, I came up with a trick – elaborate your examples. They are your saviors. Below is one of my last GMAT Write essays note the length of the â€Å"example† sections marked in red. Essay prompt: The following appeared in a memorandum from the director of research and development at Ready-to-Ware, a software engineering firm. â€Å"The package of benefits and incentives that Ready-to-Ware offers to professional staff is too costly. Our quarterly profits have declined since the package was introduced two years ago, at the time of our incorporation. Moreover, the package had little positive effect, as we have had only marginal success in recruiting and training high-quality professional staff. To become more profitable again, Ready-to-Ware should, therefore, offer the reduced benefits package that was in place two years ago and use the savings to fund our current research and development initiatives.† My essay response: â€Å"The argument that Ready-to-Ware should decrease its benefits package for professional staff omits some very important considerations that need to be addressed to get a full 360-degree view of the situation under consideration. The argument does not provide substantive evidence to be able to prove or support the main conclusion from the given premises. First, we need to consider if the decline is profits has occurred solely due to the increase in employee compensation. There could be multiple reasons for the decrease in the companys profits over the past two years. For example, the company might have one of its major customers to a rival, thus putting pressure on the revenues. If this single customer were responsible for more than 50% of the companys revenues, a severe drop in profits is to be expected. Another scenario would be if too many competitors have entered Ready-to-Wares target space, in the process putting pressure on the company to provide considerable discounts to current and prospective customers to maintain and gain market share. This is the same scenario that drove out profits from the auto industry in the 1980s. With too many car manufacturers hogging the same target consumer market, the downward pressure on car prices virtually eliminated the car manufacturers profits. One more example of a profit-declining scenario would be a ramping up of taxes by the government to cover its budget deficit. Companies usually tackle such problems by shifting headquarters to a more tax-friendly location. Hence, the argument fails to convince the reader that the fall in profits was specifically due to the increase in employee benefits and not due to any other cause. Second, the argument claims that Ready-to-Ware had problems retaining high-quality professional staff even with the increased compensation package. However, the author fails to mention the competitiveness of Ready-to-Wares benefits package in comparison to industry standards. Here, there is a good possibility that Ready-to-Wares package was very incompetitive to begin with, thus explaining the companys low employee retention rates. Even with the increased benefits package, we cannot be sure that Ready-to-Ware is providing enough incentives to its professionals to stick with it when faced with any of its rivals offers. For example, if Ready-to-Wares original compensation package totaled $30,000 in value, whereas its rivals were offering $50,000 on an average at that time for the same job position and responsibilities, it becomes quite clear why the company had problems retaining its professional employees. Again, if the increased compensation package equals $40,000 as a sum total of all benefits, it is still not sufficient to satisfy employees who can see the better opportunities offered by its competitors, and that too without considering the fact that the the average job salary in the industry might already have risen above the original $50,000 to adjust for inflation. Lastly, the argument fails to take into account the negative effects of reducing the package. If the company is already facing employee retention issues, this problem might only be exacerbated by the decrease in benefits. Employees might leave the company is hordes, leaving their positions unmanned, and at the same time creating a two-sided problem for the company which might not be able to attract new employees due to their low salary offering. In the worst case scenario which in this case I believe is actually realizable, that company might go out of business and have to liquidate itself. In summary, this argument is extremely flawed and unconvincing for the abovementioned reasons. The author fails to take a complete view of the situation and omits some very important considerations required to assess the merits and issues in this situation. If only the author had taken all the above points into account and omitted the counterarguments, the line of reasoning would have been considerable strengthened. â€Å" Notice how the examples have been stretched out and well-developed? It’s easy to do once you practice a few times. Start telling a story in the example, and many a times you’ll find it’s actually more difficult to stop writing than to keep extending. Practicing a few times will give you a good sense of how long each paragraph should be. In most of my essays, the lengths of the 3 body paragraphs decrease from top to bottom – it’s just because I like it that way. How you want it to look is up to you. Don’t bother to put your 3 points in any order – each can be substantiated well beyond 100 words – your brain will take care of that. To reiterate – conjure examples out of thin air as long as they help strengthen your argument. It’s not cheating, it’s just common sense. A good essay takes time – give me a day and I’ll cook you a feast you’ll never forget; give me a half hour and I’ll microwave leftovers. If I had more time to write that essay above, I’d NEVER EVER have formatted it the way I have done and it’d have come off WAY BETTER than it currently is – and that will be true for your essay too, it’ll be far from your perfect work. But who cares as long as it gets you that 6, eh? And the time allotted for this step? Just make sure you finish your essay by the 29th minute. If you aim for the 29th minute, you might need 30 seconds extra and you’ll have a buffer. I tried to finish it by the 30th minute once when practicing and ended up leaving an open sentence when software abruptly ended my essay session. It’s best to finish by the 29th minute. 4. DO NOT reread. Relax. Trust the template and trust what you’ve filled in the blanks. Rereading will only lead to anxiety and might screw up your later sections. There WILL be mistakes in your essay. Remember – it’s a draft, you’re allowed some grammatical, spelling or punctuation mistakes. Practice Practice makes a man perfect. And women too. Sorry for that clichà ©, but none of this will be helpful unless you write your own essays to get the hang of it. Depending on your confidence level, you’ll need to write 4-8 essays to get comfortable with typing it all out in 30 mins without a hitch. And again, if you want to get really confident about your scores, just get a GMAT Write package – it’s much more satisfying to actually see your essay graded by the actual e-rater algorithm. GMAT Write also gives you a breakup of your score, so it’ll be easier for you to hit the deficient areas if any. On the day of the GMAT Trust your template. Don’t question your method just because it’s mechanical. Remember – you’re running a marathon and this is just the first 1/7th of it. Conserve your energy. Just follow what you’ve planned without questioning. And once the essay is done, forget about it. Concentrate on the sections you’re doing. This article might be about scoring a 6 but most schools don’t care as long as you score a 4+. The high score is just to satisfy your big ego. Best of luck for your GMAT and Id love to hear any feedback!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Challenging Religion through the Women’s Right

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Challenging Religion through the Women’s Right Movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a powerful writer who believed on the abolition of slavery and that women’s voice should be heard. Stanton, along with other members of the woman suffrage movement recognized how the Christian Church supported men’s oppressive behavior toward women. She realized that women’s position in the Church became so deteriorated that horrifying acts against women became justified and accepted by the public. â€Å"The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.† Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote these lines in the Woman’s Bible as a wake up call for women who were accepting and taking for gran ted their own value in the eyes of God. Moreover, Stanton was aware that she was fighting against an institution that has taken away women’s rights from its sacred books and conveniently has created a patriarchal nation that was the setting for a perpetuate abuse against women’s rights. The words of Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Christian theologian, summarizes what the Church and society itself followed and still believed during the 19th century: â€Å" woman was created to be man’s help meet, but her unique role is in conception†¦since for other purposes men would be better assisted by other men.† Cady Stanton revises the Bible in 1881, considering that this action was needed, since no women participa... ... not acceptable according to the Christian Holy book. Therefore, solutions to women’s issues regarding men’s oppressive acts can be heard and God’s word would not be hold responsible for sexist behaviors that keep women into the darkness of silence. References Blaney, Mary. Role of Women in the Catholic Church. 14 April 2004. http://www.votf.org/papers/A WomansPlace.html Trinity Stores: Icons and Art, Religious Gifts, Catholic & Christian Products. 14 April 2004. http://www.trinitystores.com/main.php4?detail=39&artist=1 Women and the World. 14 April 2004. http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/demeier/women/women.html Schools of 19th Century Christian Feminism. 14 April 2004. http://www.erasofelegance.com/gender2.html Stanton, Cady Elizabeth. The Woman’s Bible. The Complete Text in Two Volumes 14 April 2004 http://www.undelete.org/library/library0041.html

Behavioral Finance and Wealth Management

Some financial advisors are needlessly struggling with behavioral finance because they lack a systematic way to apply it to their client relationships. In my 2006 book, Behavioral Finance and Wealth Management, I outline a method of applying behavioral finance to private clients in a way that I now refer to as â€Å"bottom-up. † This means that for financial advisors to diagnose and treat behavioral biases, he or she must first test for all behavioral biases in a client, and then determine which ones a client has before being able to use bias information to create a customized investment plan. In my book I describe the most common behavioral biases an advisor is likely to encounter, explain how to diagnose these biases, show how to identify behavioral investor types, and finally show how to plot this information on a chart to create the client's â€Å"best practical allocation. † But some advisors may find this bottom-up approach too time-consuming or complex. So, I created a simpler, more efficient approach to bias identification that is â€Å"top-down,† a shortcut if you will, that can make bias identification much easier. I call it Behavioral Alpha, and the core of this process is four behavioral investor types. Over the next four articles, we will learn the four behavioral investor types and how to deal with each of these types of investors. For readers to understand behavioral investor types, they need to get a fundamental understanding of the 20 behavioral biases I outline in my book. In this article, we will review these biases that are encountered with actual clients, with a description of the bias and a classification of whether the bias is cognitive or emotional. Behavioral biases fall into two broad categories, cognitive and emotional, with both varieties yielding irrational judgments. A cognitive bias can be technically defined as a basic statistical, information processing, or memory error common to all human beings. They also can be thought of as â€Å"blind spots† or distortions in the human mind. Cognitive biases do not result from emotional or intellectual predisposition toward a certain judgments, but rather from subconscious mental procedures for processing information. On the opposite side of the spectrum from illogical or distorted reasoning we have emotional biases. Although emotion is a difficult word to describe and has no single universally accepted definition, an emotion is a mental state that arises spontaneously, rather than through conscious effort. Emotions are physical expressions, often involuntary, related to feelings, perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or relations between them, in reality or in the imagination. Emotions can be undesired to the individual feeling them; he or she might wish to control their emotions but often cannot. Investors can be presented with emotionally based investment decisions, and may make suboptimal decisions by having emotions affect these decisions. Often, because emotional biases originate from impulse or intuition rather than conscious calculations they are difficult to correct. Emotional biases include endowment, loss aversion, and self-control. We will investigate both cognitive and emotional biases in the next section. The distinction between cognitive and emotional is an important one, because advisors will want to advise their clients differently based on which types of biases are being acted out. In the next four articles, we will use the biases described here a lot, so I encourage readers to get to know the biases presented here in concept. We will apply them to client situations in subsequent articles.

Literary Analysis Of The Outsiders - 1217 Words

The Same Sunset â€Å"Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.† This is what Ponyboy thinks to himself as he was walking with Cherry after the movies. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the mid 1960’s. This story is all about Ponyboy growing up around the conflicts between two societies. All of the main characters face many conflicts, which are mainly about their social statuses, about the rich and about the poor. In the story, Johnny kills Bob, who is Cherry’s boyfriend at the time, this causes Johnny and Ponyboy to hide out at an abandoned church; there is a fire at the church, and Johnny and Ponyboy save multiple kids, but injuring themselves in the process. Johnny†¦show more content†¦Cherry can be classified as emotional for a number of reasons. In one instance, Cherry and Marcia decided to leave with their boyfriends after the movies, so that they would not fight Po nyboy, Johnny, and Two- Bit. As Cherry was about to leave, she turns to Ponyboy and says, â€Å"I can fall in love with Dally Winston, I hope I never see him again, or I will† (Hinton 46). This is showing that it does not matter if Cherry is a Soc, she can fall in love with someone who is not a part of, or in her social status. Another example of her being emotional is when Cherry and Ponyboy are waiting in line for popcorn at the movies; Ponyboy is telling Cherry how Socs beat up Johnny bad. She then tells Ponyboy, â€Å"Things are rough all over† (Hinton 35). What Cherry is meaning is that even though most Greasers do not think so, Socs also have similar, yet different problems of their own that they deal with on a daily basis. It is clear that Cherry can be described as a very emotional character. Her red hair is not the only thing that is fiery about Cherry Valance. Fiery or hot-tempered are things that describe Cherry in many different situations throughout this n ovel. This is very clear when Dally was at the movies with Ponyboy and Johnny; he was acting very inappropriate around Cherry and Marcia while they were trying to watch the movie. Dally attempted to give them a Coke, so Cherry can â€Å"cool off.† Marcia did happen toShow MoreRelatedLiterary Analysis Of The Outsiders1661 Words   |  7 PagesThe Outsiders Literary Analysis Is the American Dream fact ? Or Fiction ? In the novel The Outsiders, the author S.E Hinton explains the story of a young boy named Ponyboy and the struggle to survive, to find out the rights and wrongs in society, taking on difficult challenges like social class, loved ones, loyalty and rivalry between two different social classes . The question is brought up, is the American Dream fact ? Or fiction ? 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