Pls review and rate my GRE Issue essay

[Floyd Wilkinson]

"A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position."

 

The statement concerned means creating and applying a kind of universal and comprehensive program in order to provide all the pupils to study the same set of subjects and disciplines at about the same level. Although one can say that multipurpose curriculum may give a lift for the students to master a broad spectrum of skills and to learn a lot of lore, it's not without problems.

First and foremost one should accept that a universal program offers one and the same set of subjects while it does not take into account either abilities or interests of the students. It may be boring for the gifted children to study, for example, chemistry or math at the level, which has moderate difficulty for common pupils. And vice versa - lagging ones can not cope with such kind of workload. So this apporach will cause an inevitable gap between talented students and lagging ones and will force the teacher to waste more time to help the latter, making the gifted ones to get bored more and more. So this is an inefficient use of time.

Futhermore, the students trained with such kind of curriculum master skills of writing, calculation and some fragmentary knowledges in a number of fields by the time of graduatuion. But this "knowledges" fill the heads like old things fill an attic. It is ubiquitously distributed, that people with so-called "crossword erudition" can not apply their spectrum of lores on practice, because they spend so much time to learn something new in prejudice to master how to use this "something new".

Finally one should consider, that in order to enter any of prestigious university, students are to create their own schedule with subjects needed. How it can be possible, if everyone must study only one curriculum? This automatically leads to the necessity of expanding the schedule and taking more and more time for studying and exhaustes the studends a lot.

To sum up it is worth saying that only the curriculum, which as much as possible takes into account abilities, possibilities and interests of a specific student, can help him develop his strengths and decide on the future.

[alanine]

One strength of the essay is that you provide multiple reasons to back up the claim that a universal curriculum may not be necessarily beneficial. For example, you discuss both students who are ahead of base level and behind base level, and how the curriculum would affect them both negatively. Additionally, you address future concerns for students, i.e. that they might find themselves ill-equipped to carve out their own curriculum when the time comes. The essay you have written does clearly address the topic and gives a circumstances and reasonings as to why you do not support a national curriculum.

However, I identify a few main problems with the essay. 

• The most obvious is that it reads like a non-native speaker. I don't know how heavily this will factor into their scoring, but it is clear that while you have strong competency and comprehension of English, your writing skills are not quite fluent. There are a few awkward phrasings and obviously inappropriately used words, for example "to learn a lot of lore", "crossword erudition", "spectrum of lores". Rather than "lore" I believe you mean to use the word "subject" or "material". 
• You do not clearly state your position. While you say "it is not without problems", all your arguments seem to indicate that you are strongly against a national curriculum. State this clearly and directly.
• Your concluding sentence clearly shows your reasoning, but again, does not state your position. You should make it clear that you feel a universal curriculum does not satisfy your criteria for a good curriculum. 
• Your second paragraph is very difficult to understand, to the point where I am not sure what you're trying to say. I understand that the time constraint is stressful, but try to word your points more simply. They want to see that you can outline a logical and clear thought process, and using complex words inappropriately will not help this point.
• Your third paragraph contains little explanation or evidence for your claim. While you do not need direct evidence of course since you cannot cite anything, it would be helpful to expand a little upon how a curriculum that is not a national curriculum might better prepare students for academic success later on.

With all this in mind, and looking at the GRE scoring guidelines, I would give your current response a score of 3. 

Score 3: 

A 3 response demonstrates some competence in addressing the specific task directions, in analyzing the issue and in conveying meaning, but is obviously flawed.

A typical response in this category exhibits ONE OR MORE of the following characteristics:

• is vague or limited in addressing the specific task directions and in presenting or developing a position on the issue or both
• is weak in the use of relevant reasons or examples or relies largely on unsupported claims
• is limited in focus and/or organization
• has problems in language and sentence structure that result in a lack of clarity
• contains occasional major errors or frequent minor errors in grammar, usage or mechanics that can interfere with meaning

Edited August 21, 2017 by alanine