The following appeared in a memo from the director of student housing at Buckingham College.
"To serve the housing needs of our students, Buckingham College should build a number of new dormitories. Buckingham's enrollment is growing and, based on current trends, will double over the next 50 years, thus making existing dormitory space inadequate. Moreover, the average rent for an apartment in our town has risen in recent years. Consequently, students will find it increasingly difficult to afford off-campus housing. Finally, attractive new dormitories would make prospective students more likely to enroll at Buckingham."
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.
My assessment on this argument indicates that it seems plausible, but actually is not well reasoned. The author tries to emphasize the importance by citing the current trends of increasing enrollment, predicting the doubled enrollments and referring to the recently growing apartment rent. However, the director wrongly uses those evidences.
First of all, the director points out that the enrollment has growing trends currently, thus infer that the enrolled students will double over the next 50 years. To say the least, whereas, this number is ridiculous since it is not substantiated by any scientific calculations. Moreover, the author acquiesces that the current trends will last for at least 50 years. Could this be true? No evidence is shown to provide support for this. It is not hard to imagine the possibility that in few years before the new dormitories are built up, the enrollment decreases again for various reasons such as declining education quality. In this situation, the newly built dormitories would be of no avail. Hence, in order to strengthen his stand, it is advisable to do some detailed research to make clearer how’s the enrollment tend to change in the long term.
Secondly, by referring to the risen apartment rent, the director means to emphasize the competitiveness the college will gain if building new dormitories. However, as is mentioned, the average rent merely rose in recent years, showing no evidence that it will continuously go up in the long run. What if the rent decreases again possibly due to a sudden decline in residents caused by emigration? Besides, the average rent suffers from a lack of precise rent information around the Buckingham College, since it could be true that the rent in the college’s neighborhood remains steady even though the average rent in the town increases.
Finally, in reference to the director’s aim to attract more students, plenty of important factors which are beneficial for the college are left out. Those factors might be to hire more educated professors, to renovate its library and to introduce more interesting courses. For instance, perhaps the students care more about how well would they be educated, thus to offer a higher salary to attract eminent professors may help the college gain more edges than just extend the dormitories. In a word, it is undesirable merely limiting the attention on the housing affairs.
To sum up, the author’s claim is not irreproachable because the reasoning is undermined by the flaws of unverified prediction, wrong data utilization and incomplete consideration of the factors which could be beneficial for the college.
Discourse Markers used:
['actually', 'besides', 'but', 'finally', 'first', 'hence', 'however', 'if', 'may', 'moreover', 'second', 'secondly', 'so', 'then', 'thus', 'well', 'whereas', 'at least', 'for instance', 'such as', 'first of all', 'to sum up']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.216326530612 0.25644967241 84% => OK
Verbs: 0.15306122449 0.15541462614 98% => OK
Adjectives: 0.102040816327 0.0836205057962 122% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0632653061224 0.0520304965353 122% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0224489795918 0.0272364105082 82% => OK
Prepositions: 0.108163265306 0.125424944231 86% => OK
Participles: 0.0428571428571 0.0416121511921 103% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.99073776725 2.79052419416 107% => OK
Infinitives: 0.0408163265306 0.026700313972 153% => OK
Particles: 0.0102040816327 0.001811407834 563% => OK
Determiners: 0.122448979592 0.113004496875 108% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0204081632653 0.0255425247493 80% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.0102040816327 0.0127820249294 80% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 2669.0 2731.13054187 98% => OK
No of words: 427.0 446.07635468 96% => OK
Chars per words: 6.25058548009 6.12365571057 102% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.54576487731 4.57801047555 99% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.384074941452 0.378187486979 102% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.313817330211 0.287650121315 109% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.236533957845 0.208842608468 113% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.170960187354 0.135150697306 126% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.99073776725 2.79052419416 107% => OK
Unique words: 241.0 207.018472906 116% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.564402810304 0.469332199767 120% => OK
Word variations: 67.1182726673 52.1807786196 129% => OK
How many sentences: 20.0 20.039408867 100% => OK
Sentence length: 21.35 23.2022227129 92% => OK
Sentence length SD: 62.2317443111 57.7814097925 108% => OK
Chars per sentence: 133.45 141.986410481 94% => OK
Words per sentence: 21.35 23.2022227129 92% => OK
Discourse Markers: 1.1 0.724660767414 152% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.14285714286 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 3.58251231527 0% => OK
Readability: 52.7317330211 51.9672348444 101% => OK
Elegance: 1.53846153846 1.8405768891 84% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.450121241993 0.441005458295 102% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.105943646508 0.135418324435 78% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0638710294592 0.0829849096947 77% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.547152908728 0.58762219726 93% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.197356351559 0.147661913831 134% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.166467449229 0.193483328276 86% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0938322994231 0.0970749176394 97% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.432134710232 0.42659136922 101% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.0665374495485 0.0774707102158 86% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.305918547014 0.312017818177 98% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0193779910978 0.0698173142475 28% => The ideas may be duplicated in paragraphs.
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 10.0 8.33743842365 120% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 6.87684729064 102% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.82512315271 62% => OK
Positive topic words: 8.0 6.46551724138 124% => OK
Negative topic words: 5.0 5.36822660099 93% => OK
Neutral topic words: 2.0 2.82389162562 71% => OK
Total topic words: 15.0 14.657635468 102% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6 -- The score is based on the average performance of 20,000 argument essays. This e-grader is not smart enough to check on arguments.
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Note: This is not the final score. The e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.