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[gonzapau]

Just looking for some feedback on 2 essays from the Kaplan prep.  First practice test (timed), and I'm fresh out of college.  Thanks!

 

Essay 1 Present your perspective on an issue: All too often, companies hire outside consultants to suggest ways for the company to operate more effciently.  If companies were to spend more time listening to their own employees, such consultants would be unecessary.

 

Many schools of thought go into whether a business is successful or not.  This statement challenges one system against another more collaborative approach.  The challenged system is more of a hierarchal ladder where one must work their way up from the "bottom of the ladder" in order to move up.  Only after acheiving experience, tenure, and a reputation can they "move up the rungs" and have a say in how the company works.  This statement also suggest that companies must use these "consultants" in order to figure out where their weaknesses are in order to "operate more efficiently."  The opposing idea is more of a democratic approach where companies take suggestions of workers into consideration in order to create a stronger system all together.  It also implies that ideas from their employees would render these consultants "unecessary."  Based on the success of modern day businesses, I believe that input from employees is highly important, especially for staff satisfaction, but this does not render the use of consultants uncessary.

The reason consultants are used is because they bring an outside perspective from their experience.  Business managers of large firms see them as useful because as a profession, their specialty is understanding efficiency of bussinesses as a whole, and knowing how to consolidate responsibilities of individual roles and resources to a minimum.  This is effective from a financial standpoint due to the reduction, but it can also put more of a burden on each employee due increased workload. Also consolidating, a word many people associate with downsizing and getting laid off, can be a hinderance to staff morale.

It is true that listening to employees can be useful.  Many companies use surveys and managers to collect data on what employees think they need.  If companies actually listen to that and employees feel like they are listened to, then staff satisfaction goes up, and invariably so does productivity.  Many times there are bright employees on the bottom rungs that have great ideas that could contribute to company efficiency.  But their lack of experience prevents them from getting noticed.  

So I believe it is true that listening to employees could increase productivity and efficiency of a bussiness.  But these factors do not necessarily negate the usefulness of someone, like a consultant, that does have experience.  Experience and perspective are very useful qualities that these people can bring in.

 

Essay 2 Analyze an Argument: Many lives might be saved if inoculations against cow flu were routinely administered to all people in areas where the disease is detected.  However, since there is a small possibility that a person will die as the inoculations, we cannot permit inoculations against cow flu to be routinely administered.

 

This argument presents a common problem in healthcare.  This is whether certain interventions, in this case the cow flu "inoculation," risks outweigh the benefits.  The way the argument is worded, this "inoculation" cannot be "routinely administered" due to the "small possiblity that a person will die as a result of the inoculation."  From a logical standpoint, if the number of people that were saved from cow flu due to the inocuation, this can be called variable a, outweighs the number of people that die from the inoculation, this can be called variable b, then it can be easy to say that it is worth it to routinely administer the inoculation to all people in the area the disease is detected.  But because this intervention is one that affects human lives, the situation becomes more convoluted, and more factors and evidence must be examined.

What must be examined is this: is there empirical evidence that this inoculation really is the cause of death, or would these people have died anyways from the flu or another cause, what are the actual statistics of variable a and variable b, are there long or short term side effects from the inoculation that can affect quality of life, and if education is properly administered to the population, do the risks really outweigh the benefits?

Each question will be examined individually.  First, Is there empirical evidence that this inoculation really is the cause of death, or would these people have died anyways from the flu or another cause?  The argument hasn't explored this concept yet, and vaguely left the idea as a "small possibility."  There is an understanding in the healthcare field that hard evidence is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain whether cause of death can be attributed to this, but theoretically many doctors and researchers can vaguely point to allergic reactions or "bad side effects."  There are many other factors that could have contributed to cause of death, but due to lack of research the inoculation can easily be blamed.  If there is empirical evidence that the vaccine was the cause of a persons death, then this argument could be strengthened.

Secondly, the statistics of what happened are never actually revealed by the study.  If there is a 99.9% chance that this inoculation can prevent a person from contracting a deadly strain of this disease, and a 0.000001% chance that this disease resulted in a death post-inoculation, (leaving a 0.999999% chance that the person contracts the disease anyways), then this is a statistic that can be dispered to that population.  Giving this statistic could justify giving the vaccine, especially if the  population have the right to say no.

Lastly, Are there long or short term side effects from the inoculation that can affect quality of life, and if education is properly administered to the population, do the risks really outweigh the benefits?  If there are side effects that occur from the inoculation, then yes people may not want to recieve the vaccine, and potentially risk the chance of contracting the disease.  If this education is properly administered to the enitre population, they could be given the choice of whether or not to take the inoculation, or not.

 

 

[PeakPerformance]

Hi,

 

I strongly recommend that you only practice with the official topics for the argument and issue essays released on the ETS website. You will be writing on one of these official topics come the day of your test and the more familiar you are with the actual topics the better.  There are 3 logical errors in particular that appear (either separately or in combination with another) in most of the argument essay prompts and you should become familiar with the patterns.  The argument prompt you wrote on in the above essay is not an accurate reflection of the official argument prompts.