Should I Care About the GRE Essays?

What do the GRE essays entail?

The essays, often referred to as the Analytical Writing Measure, are the first thing you'll see when you arrive for the GRE. You will be asked to write an essay in response to a statement on politics, art, education, etc.—a topic you might write an essay on without having specialist background knowledge—after you sit down at the computer and click "Start." Following this initial essay, you will be given a second essay topic and given another 30 minutes to prepare your response.

In other words, you'll be writing for the first hour of the GRE. The essays usually appear first, in contrast to the rest of the test, which includes the Verbal and Quant parts, of which four are scored (two Verbal and two Quant), and one is unscored.

Why don’t people think the essays matter?

There are a couple of reasons why the essays have earned a reputation of “not mattering.” First, because your essay-writing is not scored on the same 130–170-point scale as the Verbal and Quant sections, it isn’t what people have in mind when they tell you their “GRE score.” For the essays, you receive a separate score. This score is on a scale of 0-6 and given in half-point increments. Most people get between a 3 and a 4.  

Second, the GRE is a test required for a broad range of programs at a broad range of schools. Expectations and requirements when it comes to GRE scores vary tremendously, and it isn’t uncommon for a program not even to mention the essays. (For example, a particular graduate program might report on its website that its median GRE scores are 160 Verbal and 160 Quant, and leave out the essays altogether.) Indeed, this is common enough that a popular perception is that the essays “don’t matter.”  

But before you dismiss them, here are a few things to consider:  

1. Some schools/programs do care about the essay score. It is very, very important to check—and check again—the expectations and requirements of any program to which you might apply before simply deciding not to care about the essays. It doesn’t matter that most programs aren’t essay-focused if a program you are applying to is—that’s the one that matters to you and your future.

2. Some schools/programs care that you reach a threshold in two out of three GRE categories. Sometimes a school won’t call out the essays specifically but will state an expectation that you, as an applicant, score over a particular threshold (often a percentile, like 70th percentile) in two out of the three parts of the test: Analytical Writing, Verbal, and Quant. This presents a major opportunity for you if you’re someone who struggles in, say, Quant: You may have a lot of difficulty topping the 70th percentile on the math portion of the test, but topping the 70th percentile on the essays is a more achievable goal for you.  

3. The essays still reflect on you as an applicant. Just because a school or program doesn’t formally state that the essays “matter” to your application doesn’t mean that they don’t. The school will see your entire score for a given test date—including your essay score. Deciding that it doesn’t matter at all and that you’re not even going to try, and therefore winding up with a score of, say, a 2, doesn’t look great. It’s not going to ruin your chances of admission, but it certainly isn’t going to help them.

How to think about the GRE essays

In sum, don’t assume that the programs to which you’re applying don’t care about the essays. They might. If even a single program does care—or even cares implicitly by stating a threshold requirement in two of the three parts of the test—you will want to take them seriously by preparing for them, rather than going in and winging it, or casually writing an unstructured or excessively brief response to an essay prompt.  

Second, even if no program to which you’re applying officially “cares” about the essays, remember that you are being represented by your application in full, which includes your GRE essay score. A blasé approach to the essays doesn’t reflect well on you as a conscientious test taker, writer, and student. You certainly shouldn’t prioritize the essays in terms of your study preparation before the test or energy allotment during it—but neither should you assume you can get by simply rattling off a few sentences and calling it an “essay.” In this scenario, do your best while saving your energy for the main event—the Quant and Verbal sections.

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