Hello, I was hoping I could receive feedback on my response to an AWA Sample. This was my first practice essay.
Sample Source: GMAT Official Guide 2018
Topic:The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter:
"The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated:
a recently published survey indicates that 79 percent of nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey
questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits
programs."
Discuss how well reasoned... etc.
My Response: The company’s rebuttal towards employee apathy about management issues is flawed in many ways. The main flaw is the failure to specify management issues that employees feel apathy towards and assuming certain topics that a sample of employees expressed interest in from the survey represent the overall feeling of the company’s employees.
The opening section of the statement is vague when corporate describes management issues. There are no details provided about what specific management issues employees feel apathetic about. Furthermore, corporate makes the assumption that because a sample of employees expressed high interest in corporate restructuring and redesign of the benefits program, this must mean that employees are not apathetic about management issues. This conclusion by corporate is flawed because it is not clear if those two topics are considered issues by the employees to begin with.
The use of the survey by corporate further flaws the claim that there is general apathy among employees about management issues. For starters, no information is known regarding the content of the survey. Additionally, we do not know if a 3rd party designed the survey or if it was design by corporate. It is possible that if designed by corporate, the questions could be biased towards corporate’s rebuttal of the claim.
A closer look at the survey numbers support that corporate’s rebuttal is flawed. The published survey results said nearly 1,200 works took they survey and 79% expressed a high level of interest in specific topics. These numbers appear to seem positive towards employee attitude towards management issues, but it is possible that 1,200 employees are a very small fraction of the company. If that is the case it would actually make a stronger case that employees do have apathy about management issues because the majority of the employees did not even participate in a survey.
Corporate’s rebuttal could be strengthened if management issues were defined more clearly. This would improve the accuracy of the survey results by seeing if the two topics that showed high interest by employees who took the survey also felt that these were management issues. However, this still doesn’t address the numbers of the employees who took the survey.
These examples support the idea that the company’s rebuttal contains flaws.