GRE essays

[JPPT]

Hello, I'm currently practicing essays so I can take my GRE exam. I currently can not afford a professional tutor to review my essay, so I'm using all resources available to me. I did these two essays under a 30 minutes restriction and spell check off. Thanks!


Competition for high grades seriously limits the quality of learning at all levels of education.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position. 

    Competition can be very helpful for students when they place an emphasis on education. I disagree that competition for high grades limits the quality of learning because  when students have a motivation to do well in school they devote there time and effort. When a student gets motivated to do well in school because he/she wants to keep up with his/her friends, he/she will put in the work and the time to make sure it happens.
    When a student is in a learning environment and takes his/her education serious, learining becomes fun. The student will enjoy striving for a higher grade to not only compete with the classmates, but to also learn the material to its max potential. For example, my cousin was home school and he does not have anybody else he can compare his performance to. Because of this, he is not really motivated to learn more and do better than what he is doing. I went to public school and surround it myself with individuals that strived to do well in their classes and because of this, it motivated all of us to get better grades amongs each other. Therefore, competition among students motivates students to do better in their education.    
    When a student has friends to compete educationally, the student has the initiative to do the extra work and put the effort into learning the school material more efficiently. For example, students that are friends usually study together and if there is natural feeling of competition among them, then  after that student session they are individually going to study  as well to outperform their friends. Therefore, it is clear that when you have friends that are inclined to achived excellent grades , then the whole group is going to learn.
           There are situations where students just focus on a excellent grade for competition and really don't learn the material. I could understand how competition can harm a student's education if they don't place emphasis on learning. For example, some student need the grade to show their friends who is smarter. However, the student just studies enough to place the information in the short term memory. This is not taking advantage of the education provided by student. The short term memory, is information that is processed by a section in your brain that will soon leave because it was not learned correctly. However, if the group of friends competing hor good grades all have the same goal, then the student will soon notive that is better to learn and place the information in the long term section of the brain.
          To conclude, I agree that competition for high grades limits the quality of learning because  when students have a motivation to do well in school they devote there time and effort. There could be exceptions to this main idea such as a student just focusing on a letter grade, but eventually the student will end up learning the right way. You could determine a lot from a student if you see who they are studying with.

The following appeared in a letter from a homeowner to a friend.

"Of the two leading real estate firms in our town—Adams Realty and Fitch Realty—Adams Realty is clearly superior. Adams has 40 real estate agents; in contrast, Fitch has 25, many of whom work only part-time. Moreover, Adams' revenue last year was twice as high as that of Fitch and included home sales that averaged $168,000, compared to Fitch's $144,000. Homes listed with Adams sell faster as well: ten years ago I listed my home with Fitch, and it took more than four months to sell; last year, when I sold another home, I listed it with Adams, and it took only one month. Thus, if you want to sell your home quickly and at a good price, you should use Adams Realty."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

    The home owner is making assumptions based off of his experience as a customer. He is not even a real state agent, yet he feels comfortable diminishing Fitch's real- state reputation. Today I will discuss the assumptions that were made by the homeowner to a friend. The owner is making assumptions based on his experience as a customer and assumes that Adam's company is better than Fitch's just just because he has more employees, and he also assumes that Adam's company is better because their avarage price sells are higher than the Fitch's not knowning weather Fitch focuses on a certain price range or not. However I could understand why he was upset about his house not being sold faster than 4 months compared to 1 month. 
    The homeowner makes the mistake of assuming that one company is better than the other one just because one has more employees than the other one. Every business owner determines how large or how many customers they want to handle accordingly and even then the company with less employees can have a higher profit than the one with more employees.  Therefore,  the owner should not give Fitch's business a bad reputation with-out really knowing about the real-state business. However, the owner could of made his arguement better by saying that Adam's company is most likely to take care of you faster due to more employees than the other company. This would of strenghten his arguement.
    The assumption of the avarage price of houses that they sold per year. So just because one is higher than the other one, does it mean that  all real state companies want to sell really expensive houses? Well, every business owner has a plan and strategy. Fitch might be focused on selling houses of price range of $100,000 -140,000 because is more advantages and there are more people that can affort it. Therefore, the homeowner can not assume that the higher the average price sell on a house the better one company is to the other. I could understand how the customer can assume this though, because of his lack of knowledge on real-state and also assuming that higher the price on a house the better.
                One can understand why the homeowner was not too happy with Fitch's company espacially after knowing they took 4 months longer  to sell his house compared to 1 month with Adam's company. Anybody will be upset, but he did not take in consideration that maybe the house he was selling was not as attractive or economic as the other one. Therefore, he can't just blame Fitch's real-state for taking so long when there are other factor's such as price for sale, area,  and condition of the house.
    To conclude,  the home owner is making assumptions based on his experience as a customer and assumes that Adam's company is better than Fitch's just just because he has more employees, and he also assumes that Adam's company is better because their avarage price sells are higher than the Fitch's not knowning weather Fitch focuses on a certain price range or not. However I could understand why he was upset about his house not being sold faster than 4 months compared to 1 month, but even then he is assuming that it was all because of Fitch's company when their were different factors that could of influenced how fast the home got sold. Therefore, the homeowner can not degrade Fitch's business when he was not well educated in the matter.

[jon_snow]

Great Essays.

I'm John and i'm also preparing to take the GRE in August.

Your essays were good particularly the issue essay. But i Think you can improve your transition a bit. Maybe by starting a paragraph with a transition word like 'First of all', 'To begin with' etc. Also you always repeat the phrase 'For example' you can mix it up a bit by throwing in 'To illustrate', 'Specifically' etc. Finally you could have dropped in this bible quote that states, 'As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another' to spice the essay. Overall it was good.

For the argument essays, you did justice to some fallacies in the prompt. However some fallacies were not exposed very well.

To begin with, I feel you could've emphasized some points better. i noticed you introduced a very strong idea in your concluding paragraph. the point that the factors 10 years ago are totally different from the factors currently. Economic factors, Social factors, Technological factors each of these can be used to severely weaken the argument that homes sell faster at Adams than at Fitch. in addition to changing factors we also have changing human tastes. The house sold ten years ago might have been out of taste during that era as opposed to the one he sold last year.

Also for the revenue argument, your example about different companies having different price ranges was good but not compelling enough. From my point of view, you could've have dwelt much on the fact that the statistic given was for only last year. To break it down, just by comparing revenues of companies from just one year is not representative enough for one to conclude that a company is better. What if for the past 20 years this is the first time that Adams are experiencing a greater revenue than Fitch. You get my angle. That could've have strongly weakened the argument.

Finally, the argument that Adam is better than Fitch based on their number of employees was well weakened by your response.

JPPT can you kindly read my issue submission and provide comments to it for me. That will be highly appreciated. Also keep posting more essays I'll read them and provide my thoughts. Thanks

 

[deadlock123]

I have only read your first essay. You need more fancy English words and sentence structures if you want 4.5 or above. And there are several grammatical mistakes (their VS there; was home schooled). The examples are also not very convincing - I'd try to avoid citing personal experiences.