ladeeda Posted August 5, 2009 Report Share Posted August 5, 2009 anyone have any good tips i keep doing practice ones and havent scored above a 4/6 i address all 3 tasks, so what else can i do to improve? EDIT: 4/6- i email essays to prep instructor, and he marks them out of 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmorelan Posted August 5, 2009 Report Share Posted August 5, 2009 anyone have any good tipsi keep doing practice ones and havent scored above a 4/6 i address all 3 tasks, so what else can i do to improve? Hi there! Are you referring to the writing sample specifically? Or am I missing something? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xi88 Posted August 5, 2009 Report Share Posted August 5, 2009 anyone have any good tipsi keep doing practice ones and havent scored above a 4/6 i address all 3 tasks, so what else can i do to improve? 4/6? What? J-T? edit: n/m..i understand now Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MCATStrategy Posted August 5, 2009 Report Share Posted August 5, 2009 Yea, she's talking about the writing sample. Essays are scored out of 6. I have a number of videos out on how to improve your WS score: Here's a link to the playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=25B519DB0723A507 You might want to do a quick search of the forum because there's a lot of information that can be found with simple searches. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmorelan Posted August 5, 2009 Report Share Posted August 5, 2009 Out of curiosity, how do you know you are getting 4/6? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hermite Posted August 5, 2009 Report Share Posted August 5, 2009 If you address all 3 tasks adequately you'll probably get a 4/6. To get a 5/6 or a 6/6 is dependent on two major things: 1) the depth/complexity of your response (i.e. is it a thoughtful response that clearly gets to the heart of the issue or is it merely scratching the surface and treating the prompt in a superficial way) and 2) the quality of the the writing. There are other things that would fall within those two major branches such as the use of quality examples which would be included under 1). On exam day whatever you do don't sacrifice completing the 3 tasks in an attempt to be more profound though. The last thing you want to do is philosophize for 20 minutes only to realize you have 10 minutes to write the entire thing. The most important thing is to achieve the 3 tasks. To rmorlean: the person probably knows that they're getting a 4/6 because they are taking a course where they submit practice essays to the verbal/writing sample instructor who grades them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hkmedic Posted August 6, 2009 Report Share Posted August 6, 2009 If you're getting ~4 out of 6, then you are meeting the basic requirements. Have you taken a look at AAMC's sample prompts? Pick a couple of prompts here and there, and every few days, just brainstorm some relevant examples and arguments. Take some time to read news articles, editorials, opinions; basically just keep up to date with what's going on with the world today. If there are certain areas, like say democracy and government, that you aren't very familiar with, spend some time reading and building a base knowledge about it. It's easy for everyone to say they know what democracy is, but often times, our views and opinions may be very biased and based on personal upbringing, beliefs and ideals. You wouldn't want an essay that was politically incorrect, no matter how strongly you believed in it. After doing a few sample prompts, you'll realize that the themes are all very similar (society, government/politics, law, education, rights/freedom, arsty/poetical stuff -_-", etc.). In fact, I have heard from other people that AAMC even uses some of those prompts they list there (there's over 300 supposedly? It's a long list...) From there, you can build "standard" responses and examples that you can use for multiple themes. Good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ontariostudent Posted August 6, 2009 Report Share Posted August 6, 2009 If your instructor is marking them, why don't you ask him/her for advice? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
war485 Posted August 6, 2009 Report Share Posted August 6, 2009 I've been told by my instructor that to get a 5/6 or 6/6 is to address all 3 tasks indepth with insight. He wanted things like a regular definition of the statement, then something really indepth, like analyzing the statement bit by bit. As for the examples, you're not supposed to make those as the highlight of a paragraph, but to make it a part of your definitions and then make a counterexample of it. How indepth they want it, I don't know since I also never scored above a 4 on the WS practices. The instructor gave an example of an essay with a 5/6 score but it's lengthy and very well written for a mere 30 minutes... In that example essay, it used real historical examples and analyzed it, which is crossing the line for me (my knowledge of history is just about none). I normally use hypothetical (made up) examples/counter-examples, sometimes from my own experience, work out my explanations. What do you do? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmorelan Posted August 6, 2009 Report Share Posted August 6, 2009 It did pretty well on the WS section, and I did use some in real world examples or historical references occassionally - but I don't really think that is necessary. personally I would avoid personal experience directly as it appears to limited in scope compared to the type of questions asked Perhaps you could work out some examples and post them here as well. We can be more helpful with some examples of your work By the way 4/6 is not bad, I would suspect that would likely hit the cut off at most schools (?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
war485 Posted August 7, 2009 Report Share Posted August 7, 2009 In business, competition is superior to cooperation. Write a unified essay in which you perform the following tasks. Explain what you think the above statement means. Describe a specific situation in which cooperation might be superior to competition. Discuss what you think determines when competition is superior to cooperation in business and when it is inferior. My Essay: In the world of business, competition must be its top priority and cooperation be the second most important priority. Businesses exist to make a profit. Naturally, competition exists if another business attempts to make a profit using the same method or selling the same product here you want to give a specific example. However, cooperation should not be overlooked since it keeps the business together this statement should be in your next paragraph. Cooperation may be superior to competition when a company needs to stay alive. For instance, an American electronics business, Cyrix, manufactured affordable lower quality computer parts. Due to other large competitive companies like Intel, Cyrix is losing money. In order for Cyrix to make a profit and to keep the business alive, it was forced to cooperate with another more successful electronics company, Via Technologies. By combining the two businesses together, they can continue to make a profit good example. This one is sketchy. I actually tried to do it properly in 30 minutes, but I think I did the "when competition is superior to cooperation in business and when it is inferior" task poorly. Quite honestly, I don't always get a 4 on essays, it only happened once. I normally get a score of 3. Sometimes I even get a 2 on those political-type statements. Political statements like: "A politician must sometimes adopt an unfavorable position for the good of the country." throw me off. I have no examples for that and I couldn't think of one. btw, did you already write the MCAT or going to? I'm writing mine on Aug 14. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
future_doc Posted August 7, 2009 Report Share Posted August 7, 2009 That is the EXACT prompt I had on my MCAT (competition vs cooperation). Luckily I had read a sample essay that was marked by my Kaplan instructor the day before Luck plays a critical role in getting into med school, other things being equal. You have just made the same point re MCAT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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