Professional English for Assessment Centres by Jagrut Thaker

In the argument above, the author concludes that the city council is not doing its job well and needs to focus on expanding significantly the police force in order to combat recent growth in the level of crime. The premise of the argument is that crime is expanding while the city council focuses on ostensibly unrelated matters such as education reform. However, the argument is flawed because it falsely assumes that the city council’s efforts to improve quality of life are entirely unrelated to levels of violence and it assumes that the crime problem can be solved by merely increasing the police force.

First, the argument wrongly assumes that issues of educational opportunity, community vitality, and job availability have no bearing on crime. However, the author fails to support this assumption. It is entirely possible that the crime level spiked due to a recent and sizeable layoff at a major nearby factory that pushed countless citizens out of work and onto the streets. With individuals struggling to survive, it should come as no surprise that people are turning to crime.

Secondly, the reasoning in the editorial is flawed because it erroneously assumes that increasing the police force will directly address the root of the crime problem and reduce the level of crime. Yet, a landmark study published in early 2012 showed that increasing the size of a police force beyond a certain point provides extremely small marginal returns in the reduction of crime. Given the fact that the local police force is already above this threshold, the author wrongly assumed that a doubling of the police force will materially decrease the crime rate.

Moreover, the argument could be improved by appealing to the city’s history with fighting crime and managing the size of its police force. In particular, approximately 25 years ago, the city council faced a situation very similar to the one it faces today: a rising crime rate and growing spending on community development. The city council decided to increase the size of its after-school programs’ budget by about 75% and this reduced crime dramatically. Faced with the same situation today, the city council should follow the path it took 25 years ago.

Essay 2

The following appeared in a memorandum issued by the human-resources department of Capital Bank:

“Capital Bank has always required that its employees wear suits at all times while at work. Last month, Capital’s employee absenteeism and attrition rates both reached all time highs. In order to reverse these trends, Capital should adopt a company-wide ‘casual Friday’ policy, under which all employees would be permitted, and even encouraged, to dress casually for work every Friday. After all, most companies in the software industry allow their workers to dress casually for work anytime they want; and those workers often remark that this policy enhances their job satisfaction. Moreover, most software firms experience lower rates of employee absenteeism and attrition than companies in other industries, including banking.”

Sample Analysis-of-an-Argument Essay (440 Words)

This argument concludes that a "casual Friday" policy would reverse Capital Bank’s high absenteeism and attrition rates. This conclusion, based solely on certain comparisons with the software industry, is tenuous at best. The memo fails to address important differences between the two industries and between dress codes, other possible reasons for Capital’s problems, and potential problems with the cited statistics.

First of all, the memo assumes that since software workers prefer casual attire, so would bank employees. But this might not be so. People attracted to finance jobs are generally more oriented toward authority and wealth, and thus prefer to wear suits to impress and intimidate. Therefore, a "casual Friday" policy might have no positive impact on morale at Capital. It might even backfire, prompting even more workers to leave the company. The memo also assumes that a "casual Friday" policy is similar enough to the software industry’s dress codes to have the same effect on job satisfaction. But would just one casual day per week be enough to reduce absenteeism and attrition? Possibly not.

The memo further assumes that the dress code is to blame for Capital’s high absenteeism and attrition rates, without considering other possible explanations. A high absenteeism rate might be due instead to other working conditions, such as poor ventilation or cafeteria food, while a high attrition rate might be explained by such factors as inadequate salaries or benefits. Since the memo hasn’t ruled out these sorts of possibilities, the conclusion that a "casual Friday" policy will solve Capital’s problems is, at best, weak.

Finally, the statistics cited in the memo seem unreliable. One cannot draw any firm conclusions about job satisfaction from "remarks" made "often" by software workers unless the remarks are backed up by a proper survey of a sufficiently large and representative sample. Nor can one draw any firm conclusions about employee absenteeism and attrition from a single month’s data. Last month’s data might have been a one-time-only spike (to which the memo’s author over-reacted). Even if not, the monthly variation in itself tends to show that the dress code, which has remained the same, is not to blame for last month’s data.

In sum, the memo has not convinced me that worker preferences and dress codes in the software industry are similar enough to Capital’s workers and the proposed policy to ensure that the "casual Friday" policy will have the desired impact at Capital. Nor has the memo convinced me that Capital’s current dress code is the actual cause of the absenteeism and attrition problems in the first place.

The problem of poorly trained teachers that has plagued the state public school system is bound to become a good deal less serious in the future. The state has implemented a number of comprehensive guidelines that oblige state teachers to complete a number of required credits in education and educational psychology at the graduate level before being certified.

The writer concludes that the present problem of poorly trained teachers will become less severe in the future because of required credits in education and psychology. However, the conclusion relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence.

The writer assumes that the required courses will create better teachers. In fact, the courses might be entirely irrelevant to the teachers’ failings. If, for example, the prevalent problem is cultural and linguistic gaps between teacher and student, graduate-level courses that do not address those specific issues probably won’t do much good. The courses also would not be helpful for a teacher who did not know their subject matter. The argument that the courses will improve teachers would be strengthened if the writer provided evidence that the training will be relevant to the problems.

In addition, the writer assumes that currently poor teachers have not already had this training. In fact, the writer doesn’t mention whether or not some or all of the poor teachers have had similar training. The argument would be strengthened considerably if the writer provided evidence that currently poor teachers have not had training comparable to the new requirements.

Finally, the writer assumes that poor teachers who are currently working will either stop teaching in the future or will have received training. The writer provides no evidence, though, to indicate that this is the case. As the argument stands, it’s highly possible that only brand new teachers will receive the training, and the bright future to which the writers refers is decades away. Only if the writer provides evidence that all teachers in the system will receive training – and will then change their teaching methods accordingly – does the argument hold.

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