GMAT and the 4 sections

You will need to practice for all sections. The schools do care about the scores.

A low AWA score vs. a 6 will make a big difference ;)

I plan on doing the AWA the last week only

I applied with a IR score of 1/8 (0%) and AWA score of 4.5/6 and no adcom said a thing about it.

kinghongkong:

Ted Mosby:

Hi guys,

Currently I'm practicing for my GMAT since I want to apply to some Msc in Finance or Strategic Management (haven't made up my mind yet) at schools like LSE/HEC.

Now the verbal and quant section is obviously important for the score. But the other 2 sections, AWA and integrated reasoning don't count towards the score.

So is it still important to practice those sections and do well on it? Or can I just completely neglect those sections as nobody cares about them?

Cheersss

You are Dutch, right?

I am not sure how much polishing your English needs, but I am sure you will be fine (assuming that you prepare well for the other sections and put some effort into studying for the AWA)

Yeah I'm Dutch, so it won't be that big of problem. It's just that I have to squeeze in the studying for the GMAT, so it's still a bummer haha

Haha. Good luck!

I got into LSE for a master in finance next year with an AWA of 4.5 (and overall 720). I'd say AWA is by far the easiest section, you can pretty much come up with a pre-made skeleton for the essay and fill it in with details from the specific question.

spd.31:

I got into LSE for a master in finance next year with an AWA of 4.5 (and overall 720). I'd say AWA is by far the easiest section, you can pretty much come up with a pre-made skeleton for the essay and fill it in with details from the specific question.

Just curious, are you doing your master in finance right after undergrad?

You can also pm me if you don't want to disclose it here.

I want to know too actually if you don't mind sharing :) ! I've sent you a pm

AWA really isn't that important, as long as you can get at least a 4 or 4.5. They just want to see that you can write in coherent logical English. IR is going to be more important because the skills that it tests is very applicable to recruiting, specifically consulting, where you have to analyze bars/charts/graphs and make deductions. However, because it's still only about a year old, adcom don't yet know how to internalize the IR score. My guess is that it will take on more importance in the next few years as adcom gets more data and figure out which score is "good."