Please score my practice GRE AWA essays

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These both come from the first practice test in the official GRE guide. Please provide a score for each. Thank you!

 

Issue: "The best way to teach-whether as an educator, employer, or parent-is to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones."

 

                The responsiblity of a teacher, be it a parent, coach, instructor or boss, is to improve upon the quality of their students. It is reasonable to state that by praising positive actions these positive actions will continue. However, I do not believe the best way to teach is to ignore negative actions. By taking action for both positive actions and negative ones the teacher will be most successful.

                It is important to praise positive actions as well as punish negative actions as a teacher. This idea can be connected to the psychological theory of punishment and reinforcement. This theory states four different ways in which a person may act in order to either make a person stop an action or keep doing that action. Positive and negative punishment serve as ways to prevent an action from occuring anymore. On the other hand, positive and negative reinforcement serve to encourage specific actions to keep occuring.

                For this essay we will use completing homework as a positive action. In order to encourage someone to continue a positive action, positive reinforcement is likely to occur. This would be similar to the praising of positive actions that the recommendation mentions. By praising a student for doing all of their homework they are more likely to complete their homework next time. This would be advantageous as the student would continue doing their work and would be more inclined to get good grades.

                On the other hand, by ignoring negative actions a teacher will at best create no change in the action. By using our example of completing homework let's say that the negative action is skipping assignments. This is undoubtedly a negative action. By not completing assignments the student is more likely to do poorly in school. By ignoring this negative action the student may start to develop their own thoughts about the action. Maybe they will think skipping homework isn't so bad or they realize that by skipping they can do whatever they want instead without punishment. This shows to be a clear disadvantage. By implementing the idea of punishment and reinforcement, the teacher will be more able to take control of the situation. For example, a form of negative punishment could be taking away the students favorite video games until they start doing their homework more. Postive punishment would work as well. An example of positive punishment would be giving the student more chores if they don't do their homework. Both positive and negative forms of punishment strive to bring the negative action to a stop. By actually taking action the teacher proves to do a much better job than inaction.

                A teacher should never ignore any action regardless of it being positive or negative. Instead a good teacher should focus on reinforcing positive actions and punishing the negative ones. By doing so, the student will continue to learn which actions are important to keep doing and thus the quality of the student will improve. 

 

Argument: Twenty years ago, Dr. Field, a noted anthropologist, visited the island of Tertia. Using an observation-centered approach to studying Tertian culture, he concluded from his observations that children in Tertia were reared by an entire village rather than by their own biological parents. Recently another anthropologist, Dr. Karp, visited the group of islands that includes Tertia and used the interview-centered method to study child-rearing practices. In the interviews that Dr. Karp conducted with children living in this group of islands, the children spent much more time talking about their biological parents than about other adults in the village. Dr. Karp decided that Dr. Field's conclusion about Tertian village culture must be invalid. Some anthropologists recommend that to obtain accurate information on Tertian child-rearing practices, future research on the subject should be conducted via the interview-centered method.

 

                The argument that Dr. Karp presents is flawed in various different ways. While it does show that a interview-centered method may provide more useful in some certain scenarios it improperly suggests that the findings by Dr. Field were entirely wrong. Dr. Karp's conclusions are flawed because he assumes that the village is fundamentally the same as the village Dr. Field observed twenty years ago, he suggests that because one study could be wrong that any study using the observation-centered approach must be flawed, and he believes that since his study methods worked in one area they will always work in different island cultures.

                First, Dr. Karp assumes that the village he studied in Tertia must be the same exact village Dr. Field observed twenty years prior. It is reasonable to assume that a good amount of things remain unchanged from one time to the next but there is no way to claim that change didn't occur. It is possible that when Dr. Field observed the village of Tertia the children were in fact all reared by the village instead of their biological parents. As time went on child rearing patterns could have shifted to the biological parents taking the role. In order to strengthen this claim, Dr. Karp should interview the people of the village that were children during the time that Dr. Field observed the village. That way he would be able to determine if the findings Dr. Field found are similar to the villagers actual childhood. If they are different then Dr. Field's findings may actually be flawed.

                Second, Dr. Karp suggests that since he believes Dr. Field's conclusion to be invalid that would make the observation centered approach invalid as well. While it is possible that a specific approach may be the wrong way to find out specific information it doesn't mean that the approach is invalid in every scenario. If it was proven that Dr. Field's findings were in fact invalid it is possible that he just used improper methodology. Maybe Dr. Field came to his conclusion based upon watching the village for five minutes and he just so happened to see something that fit his hypothesis. In order to bring more validity to Dr. Karps statement, he would have to find many more examples of the observation-centered approach proving to be an invalid method to studying cultures. However, if there would even be a single observation based study that proved to successfully study culture, his conclusion would be less probable.

                Finally, he believes that since his study methods worked in Tertia they will always work when studying other island cultures. While it is entirely possible that Dr. Karp could go to other island villages very similar to Tertia and use his interview-centered method effectively, it is just as possible that his method won't work in a village that operates a little more differently than Tertia. Perhaps his team of students will venture into a village that is not very welcoming to interviews and won't provide any information to the students. As a result they would have wasted their time and gotten no further in understanding that island culture.

                Although it appears that Dr. Karp was successful in using his interview-centered approach to studying island cultures in Tertia, he was much less successful in coming up with reasonable conclusions. Dr. Karp improperly assumed that Dr. Field and the observartion-based methodology that he represented were invalid. Additionally he suggested that his own methodology would always establish a much more accurate understanding of all island cultures based on the one successful experience in Tertia.