Teacher Ai Tests It: What Not to Waste Time On When Your AW Target Is 4 or Below

Hello, I’m Teacher Ai from Zishen Empire (字神帝國)!

In my last post I used ScoreItNow to bust common myths about scoring high on AW.
If you haven’t read it yet, catch up here 👉Teacher Ai Tests ScoreItNow! Busting Two AW Myths

In this post I want to keep using ScoreItNow test results, combined with “official” sample essays, to give some advice based on the essay scores most students need.

Why stress “official” sample essays? I want to remind everyone that the “unofficial” sample essays you can easily find online often lack any official scoring basis and are full of misleading points, so they shouldn’t be your reference when preparing. If you’re also swayed by plausible-sounding but wrong advice online, it’s even easier to take a detour and prepare in the wrong direction.

📌 Detour 1: The first paragraph must heavily paraphrase the prompt

For IELTS and the old TOEFL, heavy paraphrasing is absolutely necessary for a high score. But this is the GRE! Don’t naively assume every study-abroad test uses the same writing standards.

Let’s look at an Issue prompt:

The best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government, industry, or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.

We can run a bold test with ScoreItNow: take the part of a perfect-score sample essay’s first paragraph that restates the prompt and change it to copy the prompt word for word, then see whether the total score changes. As expected, with solid argumentation it still gets a perfect score~

Many unofficial sample essays rewrite the prompt in the first paragraph beyond recognition, so even its own parents wouldn’t know it. But after all that effort, they may not get even half the score of the real thing.

In my 15 years of grading, when students copy random sample essays and over-paraphrase, they end up swapping out the prompt’s keywords. And shifting the concept is a verbal fallacy, a classic error in argumentative logic: the whole essay goes off topic from the first paragraph. You’re digging your own hole, and the harder you try, the lower you score.

If your target is 4 or below, why not just reuse the prompt and save time to develop your body paragraphs?

📌 Detour 2: Use lots of hard GRE words and long, complex sentences

The second detour comes from an obsession with paraphrasing. When test takers focus too much on paraphrasing, some start using lots of hard words and long, complex sentences to create the illusion of rewording.

But piling on hard words and long, complex sentences is completely unnecessary, especially for test takers aiming for 4 or below. If you don’t have a good command of advanced vocabulary and sentence structures, you’ll fail to say what you mean, make fatal grammar mistakes, and may even end up with an unclear thesis!

Once again, here are ScoreItNow’s scoring results for reference:

This writer used hard words like respects, proposition, deliberation, dire and ramifications in the first paragraph, and the sentences have lots of commas, sophisticated and complex enough. But even with nearly perfect word choice and grammar, the argument wasn’t deep enough, so it only got a 4 instead of a perfect 6. If a student with weaker grammar imitated this kind of wording and sentence structure, they’d often make so many mistakes that they wouldn’t even get a 3.

Compare the official sample essay. On the same cooperation vs. competition prompt, a 5-point first paragraph looks like this:

There’s not a single word in it that people wouldn’t know, and the sentences rarely run over two lines. This shows that the key to a high score is the strength of your argument, not fancy flourishes in wording.

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So if your target is 4 or below, don’t waste too much time paraphrasing in the first paragraph, and don’t imitate overly difficult wording and sentences.

If you want to paraphrase, start from the second paragraph onward. That way you avoid the risk of going off topic right at the start while still increasing the amount of rewording across the essay. Also, rather than chasing hard words and long, complex sentences, first find ways to reduce grammar mistakes and use words and sentences you’re 100% sure of to express your line of reasoning smoothly.

Official sample essays are extremely valuable, and there’s more in them worth digging into.

Come work toward a higher score with our strongest teaching team!

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【𝒪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳ℒ𝘢𝘯𝘥 Featured Teaching Partner – Zishen Empire English Academy (字神帝國英語學院)】

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