Preparing for GRE exam? Here’s a free tool to practice Analytical writing

As a hobby, I develop Generative AI apps in my free time. My recent project — a web tool for scored practice for GRE Analytical writing task — might be useful for those who are preparing for the GRE exam.

Every year, thousands of students pass GRE General Test to get the right credentials for applying to Master’s degree in US schools. Last year, ETS (provider for GRE exam) has introduced a new section of the exam called “Analytical writing task”. While there’s plenty of paper and digital practice tests available for other parts of GRE (Verbal and Quantitative reasoning), practicing Analytical writing task has been more difficult. GRE offers only two scored attempts via partner website, and it costs $20 (you can pay $20 more dollars to get another try with the same two topics, which is not very helpful in my opinion). GRE has also published a pool of topics for Analytical writing task (there’s over 150 of them) which you can use for practice, but there’s no way of getting a score or a feedback to get a sense of how well you are doing.

To close this gap, recent advancements in Generative AI come to help. I developed a tool that helps you select any of 150 analytical writing topics, have a timed practice writing the response, and upon submission, have your score presented to you with an overall feedback on response strengths and opportunities for improvement. The tool is powered by GPT-4o (latest LLM from OpenAI), which is customized to use publicly available evaluation guidelines from GRE for it’s assessment. I have tested the tool using official scored examples openly published by GRE, and it’s assessment is very close to the official one. See screenshot below with comparison of scores:

Side-note: Official practice tools are not perfect as well. For example, if you submit the text scored as 6 from GRE examples to an official GRE practice tool — ScoreItNow!™ — it’ll give you a score of 5.

The tool also provides you with a feedback helping you focus on areas where you could improve to elevate your score:

Example of the tool feedback for a response to a “critical judgement” topic

Here’s a link to the tool itself: https://www.grewritingprep.org/

The tool is absolutely free to use. However, given hosting it costs money, I welcome any donations to keep it free and running. At this point, I have to give a disclaimer that the tool is not affiliated in any way with GRE, and does not guarantee that the scores will match ones on a real exam. The tool is intended solely for practice and informational purposes.

Hope you will find the tool useful, and best of luck at your GRE exam!