GRE essay feedback

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Hi there, I, like many others here, would really appreciate some feedback on my GRE essays so I can improve! (Hope reading it helps you in some way too!) Many thanks in advance!

Teachers' salaries should be based on their students' academic performance.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.

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There has increasingly been a push for policy makers around the world to increase the wages of teachers in order to attract more talent to pursue teaching as a profession. It is an incontestable fact that by investing in education - teachers, classroom facilities, education materials, it will reap high yielding results for the economy in the long run, and most importantly, break the vicious poverty cycle in developing countries. Then there comes the question of how do we appropriately pay our teachers, and a proposition to reward teachers based on their students’ academic results has surfaced, which I strongly disagree with.

This proposition firstly makes the broad assumption that teachers are motivated by monetary compensation, which is, in my opinion, almost insulting to them. Educators are deeply passionate about what they do, and money often has little, or any, to do with fueling that passion. An opposing argument is that there has increasingly been a push for policy makers to increase the wages of teachers in order to attract more talent into this field. It is true that most people work towards getting their paycheck every month, but truely dedicated teachers do not fall in that category. It is precisely because they are underpaid for the amount of contribution they make to society that this push for higher wages came about. Yet teachers exist in classrooms in every part of the world, poor or rich, simply because of their passion for carving a better future for their students. By increasing teachers’ salaries if their students perform better on paper, it assumes that they will put a more conceited effort into becoming better educators, as if they aren’t already doing their best for what they inherently care about.

Education is much more than purely academic achievements, it includes character building and the development of other practical skills. Granted, many detractors may argue that, in the competitive environment today, academic results is the first thing higher education institutions and employers look at, in order to discern the best candidates. That may be true in the past, but we have seen increasingly that that is no longer the case. Interviews with Fortune 500 companies’ CEOs reveal what they look for in candidates go beyond a glowing academic transcript - they look for attitude, character traits and values developed through past experiences, sometimes these even take precedence over academic achievements. If teachers’ compensation are indeed benchmarked against their students’ academic results, teachers would direct their efforts into grooming straight As students, and that will inadvertently lead to less time spent on creating an environment for a holistic education. Students will have their heads buried in textbooks, instead of giving back to the community, learning soft skills such as communication and presentation, or simply just enjoying the pleasures of life that many take for granted. We will then end up producing students of just academic achievements, instead of a diversified pool of talent which, studies have shown, is conducive for progress and growth. In addition, many students excel in other areas such as sports and the arts because of various factors, and it is unjust to not reward their teachers for pushing them in their respective areas of passion.

There are indeed many ways that we can reward our teachers appropriately, but to incentivise them using monetary compensation according to how their students perform on paper is not one of the. In fact that can demotivate them, and ultimately produce undesirable consequences for society.

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ARGUMENT TASK

The following appeared in a memo from the director of a large group of hospitals.

"In a controlled laboratory study of liquid hand soaps, a concentrated solution of extra strength UltraClean hand soap produced a 40 percent greater reduction in harmful bacteria than did the liquid hand soaps currently used in our hospitals. During our recent test of regular-strength UltraClean with doctors, nurses, and visitors at our hospital in Worktown, the hospital reported significantly fewer cases of patient infection (a 20 percent reduction) than did any of the other hospitals in our group. The explanation for the 20 percent reduction in patient infections is the use of UltraClean soap."

Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.

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The proposed explanation in the memo is given without sufficient information to support its validity, and therefore there are other possible explanations can support the 20 percent reduction in patient infections, which I will discuss below.

Firstly, the proposed explanation assumes that the reduction of patient infection is solely attributed to the use of handsoap, whereas there are several other factors that can help stop the spread of infections. For example, there is no information in the memo on how the hygiene practices differ in the the hospitals in the group included in the test. There may be stricter hygiene practices enforced in the Worktown hospital, such as ensuring more frequent disinfection of hospital equipment or the mandatory hand washing after any interactions with patients, than the other hospitals, and that can directly explain the reduction in patient infections.

Another possible explanation for the observed statistic is that the patients’ illnesses in  Worktown hospiital are of a less infectious nature than those in the other hospitals during the period of the test. This may be due to the location of the different hospitals and specializations of the doctors there, and that will result in the demographic of patients admitted and their illnesses. That obviously will lead to a reduction of patient infections, regardless of the use of the UltraClean handsoap. Again, there is no information in the memo to refute this.

In addition, the conclusion that the reduction in patient infections is also based on the results controlled laboratory study, however it is entirely possible that the effectiveness of UltraClean soap increases exponentially when a concentrated formula is used. The test conducted in the hospitals used regular strength, so it is not accurate to use the results from the study to draw this conclusion. Any of the above alternate explanations can be valid if there is no further empirical evidence to shed more light on the relationship of the strength of the concentration and effectiveness in killing harmful bacteria.

In conclusion, there are other explanations that can support the statistic observed from the test, and one cannot rely on the proposed one without any more supporting information.