<p>So I just got my official gre scores back and I got V 720 Q 770 and AW 4. AH!!! I thought the writing was what i did best on when i took the test. My question is with these scores and a 3.8 gpa, will the low AW hurt me in applying for grad schools?</p>
<p>You’re score is good for most anything. The writing is worthless for engineering / science and is merely used to gauge whether or not you can write a simple sentence for papers.</p>
<p>i forgot to mention that my field is political science. Will that make a difference?</p>
<p>720 on Verbal is pretty good and is probably 98-99 percentile. As for the AW, getting a 5 would have been nice. But I am a total stranger and I suppose I should not advise you on what to do.</p>
<p>My son who is a Humanities student, got a 5 AW and decided to retake the GRE a few weeks later. But unfortunately for him, it did not improve. AW is tricky and does not actually indicate writing ability, but just ability to know what your examiners want.</p>
<p>Since you are a Poli Sci candidate, you are going to submit a writing sample and probably more than 1 writing sample. That should make up for the AW score. 770 and 720 are fine. Congrats!!</p>
<p>AW does not matter. You would be very very foolish to retake the GRE since everything else is excellent.</p>
<p>is this ok even for high rank schools like tufts, johns hopkins, and georgetown?</p>
<p>Yes, don’t sweat it. Move on to the next piece of your application.</p>
<p>should i retake the test but only complete the writing section to leave th verbal and quant blank?</p>
<p>I hope that last comment was serious. Your GRE is fine.</p>
<p>I’m really serious and worried it’s too low. I figure if i don’t answer any questions on the verbal and quant i’ll get a “no score” so my overall performance doesn’t get worse</p>
<p>Seriously, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. Focus on other parts of your application.</p>
<p>… so you think a 0 verbal, 0 quant, and 4.5-6 writing is “no worse” than 720 verbal, 770 quant, and 4 writing? You might want to rethink this whole grad school thing…</p>
<p>I have a hard time believing that anyone is going to care about your GRE writing score when they can read things that you have actually written. Forget about it.</p>
<p>Seriously a 4 is fine (there are oh so many past threads on this topic of people with great scores on Q and V and a 4ish score on the writing. And they all say, Really, a 4, 4.5, 5 it doesn’t matter. No one care about this score unless it’s glaringly bad - like a 1 or 2… And even then…) You have a great Q/V - people will be impressed with those scores (I just successfully got into very competitive grad schools with comparable Q/V scores and interviewers rarely brought them up except for a passing, “very high verbal” remark as they looked at my app). In an ETS PDF advising grad school adcoms on how to use the AW scores, they say: “4: is likely to have little or no difficulty meeting the writing requirements” meaning it’s a perfectly good score. I really don’t know if you are serious about thinking you need to retake or just being a ■■■■■. FOR THE RECORD TO ALL CCers: AN AW 4 IS FINE. LET IT BE.</p>
<p>ok i chilled out. thanks for the input. i also contacted admissions at some of my preferred schools and got somewhat different responses.</p>
<p>One said “if you feel you can get higher scores and you have time, then why not?” …that made me nuts. it’s $160 and a ton of time that’s why not. other places said it should be fine or it’s up to me.</p>
<p>I’d hate to see you possibly get lower scores on your other two sections, but a 4 AW may hurt you at some programs. I think it’s time to meet with your academic advisor and/or LOR writers to ask their opinions. Also, you can sometimes tell which programs value AW scores by seeing whether they list averages for admission. As an example, Penn neuroscience lists average GRE scores, which shows that they value GRE scores, and state an average writing score of 5.5, which means they are unlikely to accept someone with a score lower than 5.0. Other top programs in neuroscience don’t pay attention to AW at all. You would think that an AW score wouldn’t matter in science, but it sometimes does.</p>
<p>You are unlikely to get honest advice about retaking from the program itself. Because GRE scores aren’t the deciding factors for admissions, and because the program won’t want to mislead you on that point, you will most likely get a hedged answer, such as “We consider the whole application, and GRE scores are just a small part of it.” </p>
<p>If this is the only weak part of your application, I wouldn’t worry about it unless your dream program lists average AW scores, and those scores are well above yours. When it comes to offers of admission, GRE scores don’t come into play at all; your other qualifications will be much more important.</p>
<p>The short answer is: many programs won’t even look at the AW score, but others do care, albeit minimally.</p>
<p>In my experience, very, very few programs in the social sciences and humanities use the AW number at all. The writing sample is what counts. I think some programs in the hard sciences do use the AW score, but perhaps that’s because many of them don’t ask for writing samples.</p>
<p>In short, don’t even think about re-testing. Really.</p>