Everything You Need To Know About the Business Writing Assessment (BWA)
Written by Manhattan Prep Powered by Kaplan experts, reviewed by Chris Gentry. Chris Gentry is a GMAT, GRE, and EA instructor with Manhattan Prep. He has scored a 725 on the GMAT, a 339 on the GRE, and a 167 on the EA.
If you are either considering applying or already in the process of applying to business school, you may have come across something called the Business Writing Assessment or BWA. Not everybody needs to do it—keep reading to find out whether you need to and, if so, how to do a great job!
Table of Contents
- BWA Explained
- Why MBA Programs use the BWA
- How to Prepare for the BWA
- BWA Writing Tips
- Sample BWA Prompt & Response
- BWA FAQs
What Is the BWA?
The BWA (Business Writing Assessment) is a 30-minute essay test created by the makers of the GMAT (GMAC) to test a business school applicant’s writing ability. Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management have announced that they will require the BWA for applicants who make it to the interview stage. It’s possible that some other schools will decide to use the BWA in future; check the websites of the schools to which you’re planning to apply to see whether your target schools are also introducing the BWA. (As of today, we haven’t heard of any other major programs announcing that they’ll use the BWA.)
For this assessment, you will have 30 minutes to analyze/criticize/evaluate the reasoning of a faulty argument and to organize your thoughts into a short essay response. You will be scored on the relevance of your ideas and the clarity with which you present them.
Start by breaking down the argument into its conclusion and premises. Evaluate what has been overlooked and what has been assumed.
- What are the faults with the argument’s logic?
- How could the argument be strengthened?
If that sounds like what you do for most Critical Reasoning (CR) questions, that’s exactly the point! The initial stages of your BWA analysis are the same as the process you would use for most CR questions. By the time you get to the BWA, you’ll have lots of practice at this.already seen many other faulty arguments on the GMAT, so apply the same reasoning skills that you developed when studying for the GMAT.
Why MBA Programs use the BWA
The BWA is essentially a security check to ensure that you are the one who wrote your essays. In the past, MBA programs used the GMAT’s essay component (known as the Analytical Writing Assessment, or AWA) for this purpose, but because the GMAT no longer contains this component of the exam, a couple of schools requested that GMAC create a separate writing task.
If you take the GRE instead of the GMAT, you will not be asked to take the BWA (the GRE currently has its own writing section; if that changes in future, then you might have to take the BWA).
How to Prep for the Business Writing Assessment
Prepping for the BWA is relatively straightforward, and far less stressful than prepping for the GMAT. Plan to allot between 5 and 10 hours to prepare for the BWA, spread out over two to three weeks. But before you move forward with any prep for the BWA, first determine whether you really need to worry about it. The majority of today’s business school applicants will not be asked to complete this assessment.
The majority of your BWA-specific prep time will come in the form of practicing how to organize your thoughts into an essay. We recommend planning the general structure of your response ahead of time. If you already have the general framework of your essay, then you can fill in the details based on the specifics of the argument you’re presented with.
If a program has asked you to take the BWA, or if you have reason to believe that you will be asked to take it, in that case, use our (completely free!) BWA study materials in our Free GMAT Starter Kit. We’ll get you ready to do a great job on the BWA—and congratulations on being invited to interview!
Writing Tips for the Business Writing Assessment
Below are our top tips for the business school applicants taking the BWA.
BWA Tip 1: Analytical writing demands objectivity
A critique is an objective criticism of the argument in the prompt. Including your opinion would be providing a subjective analysis, which is not the point of analytical writing.
BWA Tip 2: Draw a conclusion from your thesis statement
By definition, a thesis statement provides a summary of the main point of the essay. Remember that the conclusion of any passage, argument, claim, or essay can be found by asking, “What’s the point?” So once you’ve crafted that thesis statement, shuffle the language a bit and you have a conclusion.
BWA Tip 3: The BWA is about confidence—avoid hesitation
Your BWA essay should have a formal, confident tone. You have dissected the argument and are now presenting your objective findings. So, say what you mean using strong language.
Consider the following business writing example sentences:
I believe this argument is flawed because it is overly dependent on spurious assumptions that lack evidence.
This argument is overly dependent on unsupported assumptions and is therefore flawed.
Third-person pronouns (he, she, one) are appropriate in a BWA. First- (I, we, us) and second-person (you) are inappropriate. In fact, unnecessary self-reference (I believe) is part of what makes the first business writing example above less effective than the second. This is a form of qualification that diminishes the strength of your point.
Qualifying language also includes descriptors (adjectives and adverbs) and verbs that “soften” the edge of a statement. For example, he phrases “somewhat vague” and “rather wordy” have a softer impact than simply saying “vague” or “wordy.” Avoid these qualifiers in your BWA:
- somewhat
- rather
- pretty (as in pretty much)
- might be (as opposed to is/are)
- may be (as opposed to is/are)
- probably
This is not an absolute list, and these words are not totally off-limits. But be sure to use purposeful words and avoid unnecessary qualifications.
BWA Tip 4: Be concise, not wordy
Using active verbs and avoiding qualifiers automatically makes your writing concise. Say what you mean in as few words as possible. Consider the following sentences:
The manager seems to be assuming that the fact that there is a hamburger restaurant next to his particular video store is somehow causing that store to have higher sales volume and revenue than other outlets in the video store chain.
The manager assumes the proximity of a hamburger restaurant to his video store positively impacts that store’s sales.
Remember that graders read hundreds and hundreds of essays, and they grade them in only a few minutes.. You want the grader to see your points right away, so don’t crowd your essay with unnecessary descriptors.
BWA Tip 5: Be polished, not perfect
Graders can tell whether you had a plan before you started typing, so spend time planning before you write. If you take time to break down the argument, decide on your points, and arrange your ideas into paragraphs, then you will have written a polished AWA essay before 30 minutes elapse.
Remember that formal writing is much more structured than texts and speech. We use sentence fragments for emphasis when speaking, but they are not OK on the BWA—so, be sure to use complete sentences with proper punctuation and no abbreviations.
Consider the following sentence:
The auther assumes that teachers math skills are not up to par when the the problem might be with their teaching style. Or their training.
Save at least 2 minutes to proofread your essay. Had I actually typed the above sentence in an essay, I’d have spotted and corrected the errors upon proofreading: The author assumes that teachers’ math skills are not up to par; she does not consider whether the [deleted extra the] problem is with their teaching style or training.
The essay should read like a solid first draft. It does not need to be absolutely perfect. Remember that an imperfect essay can earn a perfect score. Perfection is not required here.
BWA Tip 6: “Who” vs. “Whom” how to chose
If a question about the action being described would be answered with “he —,” then the correct form is “who.” If a question about the action being described would be answered with “him,” then the correct form is “whom.”
For instance, in the sentence, “Queen Elizabeth II, who/whom keeps several [corgis],” you would ask, “Who keeps corgis?”
The answer is “She does.” Since “she” is the subject, “who” is correct. A second, and sometimes overriding, rule is to ensure every tensed verb has a subject in the nominative case (who). If the pronoun immediately precedes a verb, it must be the subject, making “who” or “whoever” the correct choice to serve as that verb’s subject.
Sample BWA Prompt
WPTK, the most popular television station in Metropolis, does not currently provide traffic updates to viewers. Since Metropolis is located in a Midwestern state with serious winter weather road delays 4 months out of the year, WPTK would significantly reduce the incidence of auto accidents on Metropolis-area roads by providing traffic updates.
Sample BWA Response Opening Paragraph & Explanation
The argument, which states that WPTK’s broadcast of traffic updates would reduce the incidence of auto accidents on Metropolis-area roads, has merit. However, the argument also exhibits several serious flaws which could limit its persuasiveness. The author weakens his claim by assuming that televised traffic updates would be timely enough to impact drivers’ actions, by failing to explicitly state how the updates would affect auto accidents, and by predicting a “significant” reduction in Metropolis auto accidents without specifying what kind of a reduction would be deemed “significant.”
The opening paragraph above responds to the prompt by taking a clear position, referring back to the issue briefly, and outlining the points that the essay will be addressing. Let your concise, informative opening paragraph set the tone for your essay.
Frequently Asked Questions About the BWA
Below are the most commonly asked questions about the BWA.
Is the BWA Required If I Take the GMAT?
Currently, the programs that require the BWA only ask you to take it if you are invited to interview. And even if you are applying to one of the programs that has asked some students to take the BWA, don’t take the BWA unless or until they ask you to do so. No need to burden yourself with yet another task unless you really have to.
As strange as it sounds, getting asked by programs to take the BWA is actually a good thing because it means you’ve been invited to interview! Interviews are held for a few weeks for each application round. You won’t need to complete the BWA before the interview, so you will have at least several weeks to prepare for the assessment. And your prep won’t take long.
How Much Does the BWA Cost?
It costs $30 per attempt. You can attempt it as many times as you want, and you can receive a full refund if you cancel your assessment at least 24 hours in advance.
How is the BWA Scored?
The BWA is scored by essay graders who look for whether you can clearly identify and insightfully analyze parts of the argument, develop and organize your ideas thoughtfully and logically, and connect your statements with clear transitions.
Your BWA will be graded on a scale from 0 to 6 (highest). You’ll receive one score, which will be an average of the scores that you receive from each of the two graders, rounded up to the nearest half point.
A human grader and a computerized essay grader (the IntelliMetric™ system) will grade your BWA. The two grades are completely independent of each other—IntelliMetric™ isn’t told the human’s score, nor is the human told the computer’s.
If both scores are identical, that’s your score. If the scores differ by one point, those scores are averaged. If they differ by more than one point, a second human will grade the essay to resolve any differences. IntelliMetric™ and the human grader agree on the same grade about 55 percent of the time and agree on identical or adjacent grades 97 percent of the time. (Only 3 percent of essays need rereading.) These figures are equivalent to how often two trained human graders agree.
IntelliMetric™ was designed to make the same judgments that a good human grader would. In fact, part of the Graduate Management Admission Council’s (GMAC’s) argument for the validity of IntelliMetric™ is that its performance is statistically indistinguishable from a human’s. Still, you should remember that it is not a human and write accordingly.
IntelliMetric’s™ grading algorithm was designed using 400 officially graded essays for each prompt. That’s a huge sample of responses, so don’t worry about whether IntelliMetric™ will understand your ideas—it’s highly likely that someone out of those 400 responses made a similar point. Though IntelliMetric™ doesn’t grade spelling per se, it could give you a lower score if it can’t understand you or thinks you used the wrong words.
