Wednesday, September 15, 2010

3 OP Ed

Visiting hours in dorms
Claim: Hours available to visit in dorms are too rigid
Reasons: Hard to schedule home teaching with limited hours (makes it less personal if held in commons or other grounds on campus). Only allowed four hours a week in the opposite sexes dorm. With these short visiting hours it allows for hardly anytime to socialize or to study in groups.
assumption: With longer visiting hours, socializing, studying, and church callings can be made more efficient and successful.

Standardized Testing for College
Claim: It is an effective way to evaluate how intelligent someone is.
Reasons: Every school/teacher has different criteria
Every school grades differently. Allows the teacher to evaluate their teaching. Evaluates the understanding of the subject being taught.
Assumption: Standardized Testing creates a more equal way to measure a students knowledge

Honor Code
Claim: Honor Code isn’t as enforced as they say it will be
Reasons: Many girls and boys do not wear shorts, skirts, and dresses that reach the knee length requirement. Girls still have hair extremes in styles and in color.
Assumption: Brigham Young University staff should enforce their consequences that are addressed in the honor code.

Rebecca

3 comments:

  1. Becca,

    Good start. Now here some counterpoints and other elements to consider. For your first claim, I would make sure that the arguments you are making are ones the BYU administration cares about. The church callings is good, but the social aspect probably isn't your strongest. Also, I would say think of specific changes you can propose to help resolve this problem without adding a lot of extra work/employees in the process.

    On your second claim, I am a little unsure of what you mean by standardized testing. Do you mean that every BYU Biology 100 class should give the exact same test? Proposing that every university in the nation adopt the same tests would be a practically impossible argument, so I would stick to BYU only. The main counterargument for this would be that standardized testing is not a good measure of learning. You will need to first prove the idea that standardized testing is good way to measure learning, taking into account students' various learning styles. Some students are not simply bad test takers, but actually qualify as having a learning disability in this area. Also, who do you propose would make these standardized tests?

    On your third claim, the main problem is the assumption that the Honor Code Office is knowingly ignoring infractions. Is it the Honor Code Office's responsibility to enforce this or the student's job to keep their word? With over 30,000 students on BYU campus, it is virtually impossible for them to monitor everyone. I think maybe your best argument here would be to the students themselves, asking them to live up to their choice to come to BYU and give their word to dress a certain way.

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  2. for the second argument i think it is a very interseting idea, but are u talking about standardized testing in High SChool, or BYU?

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  3. ay byu sorry I had written them down and must have not finsihed my thought :)

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