Beat The GMAT

sarinv83 · Thu Nov 05, 2009 10:04 pm

Analysis of an Issue
GMAT Official Guide page 772

"Schools should be responsible only for teaching academic skills and not for teaching ethical and social values."

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion expressed above. Support your point of view with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

The author states that schools should only be responsible for teaching academic skills and not for teaching ethical and social values. This issue is complex because what schools teach is at the discretion of the student's families and that of a collective society. However, I disagree with the author and believe that ethics and social values should be taught in order for schools to serve a better function to society and to instill the good ethics in students that in turn will lead to better academic performance.

If schools serve to benefit society by increasing academic performance, it certainly has the ability to benefit society by instilling ethics in its classes. If not taught in school, the students must learn from other ways which may not prove effective. Students might try to find ethics and social values through peers, but without a previous instilling of ethics, there is no lesson to be learned. Students might also feel school has no direction or purpose because a teacher hasn't taught them the importance of an education. Schoolteachers need to stress the value of what they're teaching or else the lessons fall on deaf ears.

Also, if schools were to teach ethics, they can leverage their performance in academics. Teach students hard work, discipline, and honesty to ensure that the students are fair, and learning to the best of their ability. For instance, teaching students about plagiarizing and the ethical implications of this act shows a student that such an act does not increase their academics and only hampers their ability to learn.

There are those that say that what one school system deems as ethical might not hold true to a society. It is a valid statement however without exposing a student to conflicting sides means the student loses the ability to reason and deem what they should feel is ethical. It would better to for schools to expose a student to complex issues than to have them not question them at all.

In conclusion, I am against the author's statement that schools should only responsible for teaching academic skills. Teaching ethics and social values alongside academics not only improves a student's will to improve academically, but it also serves a school's role in society by also instilling values which may not be taught elsewhere.

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antest07 · Mon Nov 09, 2009 8:02 am

No major grammatical mistakes. You have clearly express your thoughts and the overall flow is quite smooth, and this is why I give you a 5.

Although 5 is a decent score for applying an MBA, it is not hard to get such score(55%). I see that you have the potential to score higher. A 5.5(80%) is much better than 5. Below are my suggestions:
(1) You should support your argument by quoting examples. Make up some examples if you really don't have any
(2) Try to use GMAT sentence structures as much as possible. e.g:
-Participle phrase[comma] Main clause
-bla bla bla so [adjective] that bla bla bla
Actually I am good at writing Argument essays. You can know more by clicking http://www.beatthegmat.com/rate-on-2-to-6-scale-pleaee-t11892.html.

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