Please grade my GRE essay on an issue

[Grewal]

Universities should require students to take courses only within those fields they are interested in studying.

Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider the possible consequences of implementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.

 

Although it seems practical for universities to offer courses within those fields that the students are interested in, it does itself no favours by doing so: becoming less flexibile in terms of offering diverse courses will only reduce students' choice, thereby limiting their creativity in research.

In today's times, when interdisciplinary courses are encouraged, universities will limit themselves by clearly differentiating between various fields. There is an increasing need for students to think on multiple levels, especially as rapid technological advances are bringing togther, and not segregating, the sciences and arts to offer enriching experience to the consumer. For instance, laptops are not only a utility to crunch numbers, but a style statement with increasingly user friendly designs, courtesy Apple, taking the consumer market by storm. One can also see how technology and the medical world are coming together, wherein some doctors operate on patients located thousands of miles away via computer-operated robots. This will increase consumer welfare, with scientific innovations leading to cheaper products.

Letting students study persuasive prose as well as mathematics will only open up their minds, enabling them to understand that there is mathematics in writing compelling prose and that mathematics requires good instincts.

Some of the greatest innovations have come from America, where interdisciplinary studies are encouraged, helping students think creatively and breaking the mould. Who would have thought you could get everything under the sun, from the most insignificant items such as toothpick to expensive, top-notch laptops, at your doorstep at the click of a button. If it were not for Amazon, which took the lead and today enjoys immense market power, our lives wouldn't have become significantly easier! Amazon chief Jeff Bezos married latest techonology with keen business sense to come up with this revolutionary and simple idea. I am guessing his education at the Ivy League must have played a part in his original thinking.

On the other hand, compartemtalising students into either science, arts or commerce fields at the age of 16, leaving little room for them to explore other fields have reaped no dividends for a country like India. At a time, when everything merges into everything, you can't have engineers with no communication skills or journalists not knowing basic arithmetic: after all, journalists will become better if they use quantitave techniques to back their stories with data, like The New York Times or other top newspapers do.

My point is that in today's age, where the next economic boom will be primarily hinged on the next big idea, we need to keep ourselves and our education open and flexible, enabling the youth to think out of the box.