Argument Essay 1
The following appeared in a memorandum from a dean at Omega University. "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 thirty percent. Potential employers apparently believe the grades at Omega are inflated; this would explain why 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 now terminate student evaluation of professors."
The given argument states some factors that may have caused Omega University's grading system to be deemed unreliable by interested observers such as potential employers. It utilizes arguments such as the "inflated" grading system that, over the last fifteen years, seems to have become the norm for graduates from Omega.
This change in grading consistency is attributed to a teacher evaluation scheme (with the students as the jurors), and the argument then draws a rather abrupt and rigid conclusion that the reason for this change in Omega's reputation is completely due to the negative effect of this teacher evaluation program, and that its consequent removal will solve all the problems that Omega now has.
The first event that strikes the observer is the finality of the conclusion of the argument - that Omega University should immediately "terminate student evaluation of professors". The two main problems with the abruptness of this statement are that primarily, the argument does not state at any point that this evaluation process is DIRECTLY the cause, and the ONLY cause, of this drop in Omega's overall performance. Secondarily, the argument tends to ignore all possible positive aspects, however remote, that may have helped improve other issues in the University.
The stated premises of the argument can now be analysed directly. The author, in the first line of the given statement, refers to the "new procedure" that Omega University implemented 15 years ago to evaluate student performance. The immediate assumption made is that this commitment was not entered into thoughtlessly, but was a well-calculated attempt at initiating reforms in the institution. This leads us to a conclusion that the "powers that be" at Omega University had, even at that point, realised that there were some inherent flaws in the system that needed to be addressed; and that one way of addressing these flaws was to initiate new quality analysis and control procedures such as the teacher evaluation program stated.
There are then some premises stated directly in the argument that seem to indicate improvement in the College due to implementation of these processes. One such premise states that Omega professors have begun assigning higher grades to their students. This ambiguous statement can lead to two radically different conclusions; one negative, and the other positive. The negative conclusion is that teachers started grading students higher to curry favor that would reflect in positive teacher evaluation reports - a sort of reversal of teacher-student relationships. The positive conclusion that one would be happier believing is that these reports caused lethargic and unimpressive teachers in the University to improve their performances for fear of losing their jobs, thus leading to an overall improvement in student performance, and consequently student grades.
The grandiloquent statement that potential employers "apparently" believe grades to be inflated, can be rejected outright as fallacy, or at the very best, as an uninformed opinion stated by the author. No value can be assigned to a statement that has no basis in fact; and consequently, comparisions of Omega University and Alpha University based on this unjustified statement cannot be analysed objectively. It could be a simple case of Alpha University being a better college in all respects - some of them being the quality of their students and faculty, the environment provided, and even perhaps some issue as trivial as a better scenic view from Alpha!
The justification provided for proposing such a strong solution to Omega University's supposed problems has no relevance to any part of the argument the author has used to justify his or her stand. Thus the conclusion seems to the average reader to be completely unjustified and not well reasoned from any point of view.
Argument Analysis: 50 minutes taken though the maximum allowed is 30.