About GMAT E-rater

What the E-rater Grades

The E-rater is a distant cousin of the search engine robots that scan content of web sites to determine how relevant they are to search terms (such as that used by Alta Vista or the "concept searching" Excite search engine). The E-rater will read your essays and look for phrases that indicate competent reasoning.

The E-rater uses a stored battery of hundreds graded essays for each of the 280 essay questions. The E-rater has sample 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 score essays for each topic. The E-rater will evaluate your essay in terms of the stored essays in the E-rater's atabase. If the essay you wrote resembles the stored "6" essays in the E-rater's database, you will get that score. If your essay better resembles the "5's" in the E-rater's memory, you will get a "5" from the E-rater.

That is why it is so important to read the 20 sample essays we have. You will see how well written arguments are structured and you will learn the proper style necessary to impress both the E-rater and the human grader.

What the E-rater doesn't grade

The E-rater cannot detect certain things, such as humor, spelling errors or grammar. It analyzes structure through using ransitional phrases, paragraph changes, etc. It evaluates content through comparing your score to that of other students. If you have a brilliant argument that uses an unusual argument style, the E-rater will not detect it.

The E-rater does, however, detect spelling and grammar indirectly. If your transition phrases and logical identifiers (e.g.- "therefore", "for example") are not properly spelled the E-rater will not detect them. Since the E-rater uses the presence of such transitional phrases as an indicator of effective writing, you are indirectly penalized if they are not spelled correctly.

Strategy Changes

Does the E-rater impact human graders?

The E-rater potentially puts pressure on human graders. Human graders will create problems if they constantly disagree with the E-rater and force third graders to look over the essay (this raises cost). Although this is speculative and ETS employees refuse to confirm it, the only logical conclusion is that human graders must try to conform to E-rater standards. In this way, the E-rater acts as a managerial tool to double-check graders and keep them in line. Subjectivity and bias are an anathema to standardized tests such as the GMAT. The bottom line: don't rely on your essay being appealing to the human grader and hope he will give you a high grade to counter a low E-rater grade. Try to follow the E-rater rules.

What are the implications for the GMAT student?

On the Issue Essay:

You should not try any bold or original approaches in your essay. The essay should be written in a simple and organized fashion. If you write a boldly original piece, do not expect the human grader to acknowledge the quality of your writing.

On the Argument Essay:

The E-rater makes more sense on the Argument Essay because it is able to tell if you have identified the argument's logical flaw. The E-rater stores hundreds of essays for each essay question and you should use keywords that correspond the stored "6" essays. When you have identified the logical flaws the essay questions, (use our "usual suspects" section to identify logical flaws), make sure to state the precise logical flaws. This way the E-rater is able to detect that you have identified the correct logical flaws.

Fooling the E-rater:

1．Make your essay highly rigid in structure. Make it look, in its organization, like other 5 and 6 essays.

2．Clearly demarcate sections using phrases such as "for example", "therefore", etc..

3．Use qualifiers judiciously. The E-rater will associate careful use of qualifiers with high scorers.

4．Read our 20 Real Essays essays to get a flavor for how "6" score writing is done.

5．Use the exact terminology we do in the Usual Suspects section to identify logical reasoning flaws in the Argument Section.

Errors that will ruin your score with the E-rater (DO NOT):

1. Write an essay in a unique and creative fashion. The E-rater will be evaluating you relative to other writers, so a unique argument structure will always backfire.
2. Misspell key phrases, such as "for example" and "therefore". The E-rater will not pick this up and assume that you did not use transition phrases.
3. Throw in jokes and other unneeded commentary. The E-rater will not detect the meaning under your writing, only its structure, so making clever comments will not raise your score.
4. Use unusual references that no other business school student would use. The E-rater uses other scorers as a template based on how well you resemble other scorers. On the Analysis of Issue question, if you do use unusual examples, try to use concept keywords and a tight structure.
5. Avoid or overuse qualifiers such as "likely", "should", etc.. (link to qualifiers). Smart people use qualifiers, which means the high scorers in the E-rater's database will be filled with essays saturated with qualifiers. However, do not overuse qualifiers or it will dilute your essay.
6. Use a unique and clever rhetorical device that spices up your essay.
7. Follow Steve Jobs' clever advertising campaign for Apple "Think Different". For the AWA it is "Think the Same". You want to write as "6" scorers write. The Analysis of Issue section, in particular, is an exercise in conformity. Write opinions in the mainstream of intellectual thought.

E-rater: International Students

How international students should tackle the AWA and the E-rater.

The conventions for the AWA can be summarized in a single statement: written English requires that each paragraph be developed directly away from a topic (or thesis) sentence or
directly towards a topic (or thesis) sentence. The former is known as deductive development; the latter is known as inductive development. Since this is the case for all English written prose it should be obvious that writers in English have less freedom to wander from the main point of their discourse than writers in other languages. English expository prose style must be direct and to the point even though it is necessary to support each main idea with examples, explanations, and illustrations. The thesis (or topic sentence) must contain the germ of the idea that permeates the entire paragraph. Each example or illustration must be connected to that idea with transitional markers such as for example, thus, or moreover.

The E-rater speaks "American"

Your essays should be written in "American", not "English". Phrases that are more commonly spoken in English (indeed, hence, etc..) are less common in "American." Phrases that are commonly spoken in English are unlikely to be picked up by the E-rater, which picks up phrases used among high scorers (who are overwhelmingly American).

Students from the U.K., Hong Kong, India and other commonwealth nations should adjust their syntax, style and language to better suit the flavor of English used in America. That is the language of the E-rater. Since the "6" essays stored in the E-rater were primarily written by

Americans, you must make sure your writing style is American. Avoid any local jargon or particularly any unusual transitional phrases (e.g. "heretofore"). Got that mate? In addition, the overwhelmingly American graders will have an easier time with arguments written in American.

The solution is to read all of our sample essays and American scholarly journals to see how American writers structure arguments.