The following recommendation was made by the president and administrativestaff of Grove College, a private institution, to the college's governingcommittee.
"Recently, there have been discussions about ending Grove College'scentury-old tradition of all-female education by admitting male students intoour programs. At a recent faculty meeting, a majority of faculty members votedin favor of coeducation, arguing that it would encourage more students to applyto Grove. However, Grove students, both past and present, are against the ideaof coeducation. Eighty percent of the students responding to a survey conductedby the student government wanted the school to remain all female, and over halfof the alumnae who answered a separate survey also opposed coeducation.Therefore, we recommend maintaining Grove College's tradition of all-femaleeducation. We predict that keeping the college all-female will improve moraleamong students and convince alumnae to keep supporting the collegefinancially."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to beanswered in order to decide whether the recommendation is likely to have thepredicted result. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions wouldhelp to evaluate the recommendation.
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While it might be true that Grove College should maintain the all-femaletradition and give up coeducation, the president and the administrative staffdon't make cogent inference to validate it. We can easily tell that this issue mattersthe future of Grove, but this argument is rife with holes and weak assumptions.Readers may ask a host of questions which can easily undermine or even topplethe whole argument and this recommendation would not be able to move a littlebit further in practice.
The authors cite some surveys exerted to students and alumnae, and theresults of them point out that most of them don't concur with the coeducationpolicy. But the results are not convincing if the survey was conducted only ina small range so that samples of the survey are not representative enough. It'spossible that there are a large number of students in Grove, say 10,000, butthe survey just covered 50 people; and most of these 50 students happened tosupport the full-female policy while the rest of 9,950 mostly want GroveCollege to be a coeducation college. This lack of explanation of the surveymakes this piece of evidence lame. Unless the authors provide more informationwhich can prove that the samples they chose in the survey is large enough, we cannotsimply conclude that most students and alumnae are not standing on thecoeducation side.
By almost the same token, the authors predict that if we keep the collegeall-female, the morale among students will definitely be improved. Thisprediction is not reasonable, because there are not too many cause and effectbetween them. It's likely that students don't like Grove to end all-femaleeducation because they haven't experienced studying in a coeducation school.They may be not used to a new milieu that male students showing up in theirlives. And it's probable that once they get used to boys being around, theirmorale will be even improved and they'll enjoy the life with more malestudents. To improve their argument, the president and administrative staffhave to effectively bridge being all-female with improvement of morale and alsoexclude all the other possibilities that will cause a decline of morale.
Last, the authors also predict that staying in all-female can convincealumnae to keep supporting the college financially. Why can this effect promisealumnae's continuing finance Grove? And why can't coeducation policy make evenmore money than alumnae's donations? It's entirely possible that once boys areaccepted by Grove, more students' applying to and studying in Grove will make ahuge amount of money, which is a lot more than alumnae's donations. In thissense, Grove College may not only being more popular, but also is able to makemore profits so that equipment and facilities in the school can be updated. Ifthe authors want to still support their recommendation, they have to prove thatcoeducation will no doubt decrease the donations and not able to cause a bigincrease of amount of money from other methods.
A better environment of Grove College should be made and we have todetermine whether the school should convert into coeducation school or justremain the same. The president and the administrative staff don't make a goodinference process in this argument, so we can hardly take his recommendation intoaccount. To better the argument, they have to reevaluate the argument and alsoanswer some possible questions which will weaken the argument. Only in thissense can we consider this recommendation and take it into action. | 
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发表于 2013-2-11 15:01:44
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