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■ Direction Read the question below. You have 30 minutes to plan, write, and revise your essay. Typically, an effective response will contain a minimum of 300 words.
■ Question Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Use specific reason and examples to support your answer▶ Topic :
It is more important to give students prizes or awards for student's effort (trying) than achievement (success, grades).
▶ Your Answer :
There is an argument whether students should receive prizes or awards by their effort than by achievement. In other words, some people say that students can make mistakes when they took exams, so the rewards or prizes should not be received by their achievement. On the contrary, other people disagree with this because it they do that, they do not try to reach their goals. Although it is true that proper rewards or prizes on students’ performance should be given because they will try to do harder to receive bigger prizes or rewards, I think that rewards of students’ performance should be given by their efforts. In this essay, I will briefly present two reasons to support my choice.
First of all, if teachers or parents give proper rewards to students regardless of their achievement, they will try to do harder. In other words, it encourages them to make more efforts.
I will take one of my students as an example. When I taught math to Amy, one of my students, she was poor at math and did not have any confidence about math. That is to say, she was afraid of math. I thought that helping her to have confidence about math is more important than helping her get high score on math, so I gave her very easy assignments and took test with very easy math problems. Even though she did not get enough score, I praised and give small gift her about her efforts, and doing homework well. One day, she told me that she tried to study math very hard although it was very difficult for her since she did not disappoint me, only person encourage her to do well. Three months after I taught her, she got Grade B+ from midterm math exam. Through this, rewards about efforts make student change.
Secondly, the process is more important than results. In other words, sometimes, even though students try to study very hard, they might make mistakes on the exams, so they get low score. In this case, if teachers or parents do not reward their efforts, they will disappoint at themselves and they do not have any motivation to study hard. For instance, Jenny, my younger sister, was very afraid of Physics. She always concentrated more on studying Physics, however, because the fear of physics, she was very nervous when she took Physics exam. As a result, she did not get good grade on Physics. However, my parents comforted her doing well and they told her that they believed that she would do well next exam giving some pocket money. She did not want my parents to be disappointed, so she tried to study more than before.
In conclusion, I convince that it is better for students to reward by their efforts not by their achievements. That is because the rewards regardless of the result encourage them to try to do more, and sometimes, they may have unexpected situation such as being nervous affecting their results.