hopefulPA2B

Mmmmm.... going to give this a try, and take it all with a grain of salt. I'd give you a weak 4, maybe even a 3.5.
  - You have some fairly jarring mistakes in grammar, and use of vocabulary. "Good intentions may be absent from the child." "Practiced in more abundance." 
- The logical support and examples are a little wonky. The burglary example makes little sense. Surely a teaching-related example is more appropriate, not to mention more common in most people's lives, not to mention its not great logic. Positive reinforcement in a school setting is very different social and ethical context from law enforcement. The lightbulb is also coming from a somewhat different situation. You don't have any example of the role of praise/disapproval in education at all, just quite scattered points about things that work and things that don't. 
- The overall chain of ideas otherwise is good - "learning from mistakes," as pro, conditioning as con -  but you need to support the second paragraph with more substance (and the first with relevant substance) 
- The whole thing is a little on the short side. I'd say your first paragraph, simply restating the question, is a waste of your time. You seem to be struggling to write a lot within the time limit, so go straight to the meat of your argument. 
Good luck!

I'd say this is a little stronger than your issue essay - 4? 4.5? - but lacking in concrete examples. You note the flaw in the reasoning - the basis of the argument in the straightforward comparison between the two counties, but then you simply say that that's a problem over and over without giving any examples beyond saying that there probably are examples, or addressing the counter of Chestnut county. The 15 year thing isn't convincing either - that's a good time frame to assess that kind of thing. The question is interested in the consequences of a decades-long process. 
You could have talked about Pine county being closer to a big city or good transit links to a big city, having had a new factory open, driving up demand for housing and prices, etc, when you talk about better economy. Or, even better (I think) brought up real world examples of divergence in real state prices. "Major metropolitan areas, such as New York and San Francisco, have seen housing costs double and triple over the past ten years, while homes elsewhere across the country have lost their value due to the financial crisis of 2008." etc. Apparently, no one will check whether this stuff, as you write it, is accurate, it just kinda has to make sense.