The following appeared in a letter from a department chairperson to the president of Pierce University.
"Some studies conducted by Bronston College, which is also located in a small town, reveal that both male and female professors are happier living in small towns when their spouses are also employed in the same geographic area. Therefore, in the interest of attracting the most gifted teachers and researchers to our faculty and improving the morale of our entire staff, we at Pierce University should offer employment to the spouse of each new faculty member we hire. Although we cannot expect all offers to be accepted or to be viewed as an ideal job offer, the money invested in this effort will clearly be well spent because, if their spouses have a chance of employment, new professors will be more likely to accept our offers." - GRE Argument 57
In this letter, a department chairperson at Pierce University recommends that Pierce offer jobs to spouses of new faculty in order to attract the most gifted teachers and researchers. To support this recommendation, the chairperson cites certain Bronston University studies, which concluded that in small towns male as well as female faculty are happier when their spouses are employed in the same geographic area. However, the chairperson's argument relies on certain unsubstantiated assumptions about the similarity between Pierce faculty and the faculty involved in the Bronston study, and about h...
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.5 out of 6
Category: Excellent Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 23 15
No. of Words: 616 350
No. of Characters: 3229 1500
No. of Different Words: 221 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.982 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.242 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.815 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 257 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 206 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 131 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 74 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.783 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.142 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.826 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.379 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.59 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.087 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 7 5