[备考小组] Argument 12 Evaluation of professors [复制链接]

ee_stone
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发表于 2015-2-24 23:12:02 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

本帖最后由 ee_stone 于 2015-2-25 16:33 编辑

Fifteen years ago, Omega University implemented a new procedure that encouraged students to evaluate the teaching effectiveness of all their professors. Since that time, Omega professors have begun to assign higher grades in their classes, and overall student grade averages at Omega have risen by 30 percent. Potential employers, looking at this dramatic rise in grades, believe that grades at Omega are inflated and do not accurately reflect student achievement; as a result, Omega graduates have not been as successful at getting jobs as have graduates from nearby Alpha University. To enable its graduates to secure better jobs, Omega University should terminate student evaluation of professors.

Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.

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In the argument, it is proposed to terminate the student evaluation of professors, so that the grades of Omega University can truly reflect the achievement of students, and employers will have more confidence to hire the graduates from this university. However, to corroborate the argument, we need a lot more evidence, about the whole evaluation system, the changes in the 15 years in Omega University, and the comparison of student achievement and majors between the two universities.

Firstly, to corroborate the implied assumption that professors gave higher grades for better evaluation results, we need more evidence on how the evaluation system worked, especially the timing when students gave feedback and what impact the evaluation had on the professor. Students may give evaluation at any time slot during the whole courses. They may hand in evaluation forms after each lecture, after all lectures are given for the whole course, or after the grades are submitted. If students gave evaluation before they get the grades, there is little chance that professors gave higher grades to make them happy and got better evaluation from the students. On the other hand, if the evaluation results will have much impact on the promotion or salaries of professors, they may be more motivated to give higher grades for better evaluation.

You probably want to use past tense when discussing the students and the system; other than that your writing is quite fluent. And I think you may want to summarize the main issue at the very beginning of your paragraph. The key issue you want to address here is whether or not the professors gave better grades because of the introduction of the evaluation system. The argument was written in such a way to imply that is the case. So you may want to bring up that issue first and then discuss what evidence we need to decide if A really caused B. 已改

Besides, more detailed evidence should be collected about the changes in the 15 years in Omega University, to evaluate the soundness of the claim that grades are inflated. Actually, there are many possibilities other than grade inflation. Maybe the students enrolled in Omega University recently are smarter or more industrious than 15 years ago, or some majors or courses which notoriously gave low scores are obsolete and get cut, or the content of some courses are much more difficult 15 years ago. Any of these cases may deter the blame on student evaluation of professors for getting average grades inflated, and thus weaken the argument.Omega University may publicize the trend of SAT scores of enrolled students or average grades in each department, to eliminate the doubt on grades inflation and recover the confidence of employers,

not sure about this collocation " evidence should be investigated" just say "more evidence is needed about/ we need to collect more evidence or information about ..."
the claim that grades are inflated (or truly improved) the last three words really messed up the sentence; did you see?
what about the employers who believe that grade inflation occurred? You could discuss the possibility that there was no grade inflation; then you will also need to talk about how the university needs to convince the employers this is the case 已改

Last but not least, we need to more evidence about the comparison between Omega University and Alpha University, so that we can determine whether the rise of grades is key to the difficulty of job hunting of students from Omega University. The programs offered in the two universities can be quite different from each other, which may have great impact on the job hunting. Assuming that there are more students majoring in arts or literature in Omega University while there are more students majoring in engineering in Alpha University, the students from engineering department are definitely easier to find jobs. Thus, the comparison on job hunting between the two universities is unfair. Moreover, Alpha University may have the same evaluation system on professors and same rise of average grades, which will make it untenable to claim that the termination of evaluation on professors will help students from Omega University get better jobs.

"study more on the evidence" not sure this is the right expression
The majors in the two universities - you mean the curriculum? or the programs offered
Not mentioning that - this is grammatically incorrect - the whole sentence needs to be rephrased
已改

In short, more evidence should be investigated about the evaluation system, changes in the 15 years in Omega University and the comparison between the two universities mentioned, so that we can determine the impact of student evaluation of professors on the average grades and students' job hunting, and further evaluate the soundness of the argument.

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