Quote:
Argument Task- Fifteen years ago, Omega University implemented a new procedure that encouraged students to evaluate the teaching effectiveness of all their 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.
The author is lacking enough information to present in the passage to support its conclusion. While teaching staff is required to be proficient in their ability to teach, its not beneficial to assess their ability through students. The college authorities should take this process into their hands and only employ teachers with good proficiency.
Furthermore, the author mentions about the increase in grades of the University by about 30 percent. The question to this argument arises when we consider the reason for the increase in grades. The statement of evaluation of professors by students could affect the increase in grades in two ways.
First, the teaching staff, being cautious of their evaluation, increases their efforts in teaching which ultimately leads to a better score. Secondly, in a greed or to impress the students, the teaching staff could increase the grades of students. It should be mentioned in argument about the criterion a particular faculty considered while scoring the students.
Employers seeking to give out jobs have been shown to distrust Omega University and find it inflating the grades recklessly. According to the author, this resulted in students getting not been employed after graduation. The assumption of the author is kind of vague because this leads to a question about how the employers relate the sudden increase in grades with a student's achievement. Grades are possibly not the best way to analyse how the student's individual skills are. Its also not mentioned whether interviews took place or not. The comparison to Alpha University also
isn't clearly mentioned. It could be the case when students at Alpha University were actually good at other stuff than mere grades.
There could be many factors that play a major role in getting jobs. One's domain specific skills, communication ability, academic performance etc also work as a vital factor in getting hired. There is no strong evidence to guarantee that terminating the evaluation by students would surely lead them to getting employed. Moreover, no record of past placement statistics by the University is been shown. Also, no count of the number of employers visiting University for jobs have been delineated. With the dearth of these information we cannot predict that the introduction of evaluation strategy played a major role in adversely affecting the employment opportunities.