The writing section tests your ability to write essays in English similar to those that you would write in College courses.
The integrated Essay:
First you will read an academic passage and then you will listen to a lecture on the same topic. You may take notes as you read and listen, but notes are not graded. You may use your notes to write the essay. The reading passage will disappear while you are listening to the lecture, but the passage will return to the screen for reference when you begin to write your essay. You will have 20 minutes to plan, write and revise your response. Typically, a good essay for the integrated topic will require that you write 150-225 words.
Read:
Competition in the classroom
Although cooperation is currently the most popular paradigm in classrooms, competition has a number of advantages. Research on classrooms in which competition is encouraged has demonstrated that competition can increase motivation and productivity while students are having fun.
Competition has long been used in classrooms to motivate students, encouraging them to do their best work. Like athletes who improve when they train with others who are equal or superior performers, students tend to improve in a competitive learning setting. Considerable evidence suggests that motivation is especially enhanced among high-achieving students in a competitive classroom.
One of the main advantages of competition is that it creates an environment in which students push each other to excel and thereby increase productivity. For example, in classrooms where students compete to read the most books, the total number of books that each student reads increases as compared with classrooms without similar competitive goals.
Perhaps because competition has long been associated with sports and games, it is fun for students. Teachers often use team-based competitions to make academic material more interesting and entertaining. Some common examples are spelling bees, science project competitions, and group quizzes in which teams answer questions and receive points, for correct answers. Competition is useful when an otherwise uninteresting lesson is presented as a game. Most would agree that playing is more enjoyable than memorizing by rote for the big test. In fact, students who participate in the Science Olympiad, a national competitive event, report that the main reason for joining the team is to have fun.
Now listen to a lecture on the same topic as the passage you have just read.
Example Answer:
The lecture challenges the assumptions in the reading passage, presenting the benefits of competition in the classroom. According to the lecturer, higher motivation, productivity, and fun do not justify competitive classrooms.
First, although high achievers may be motivated by competing with their classmates, most students experience performance anxiety before the competition and low self-esteem when they don’t win. According to the professor, cheating, fear, and antagonism often occur as a result of competition in the classroom.
Next,the professor cites research by Kohn in which he looked at 122 studies of cooperation in the classroom. In half of the studies, productivity was higher in a cooperative classroom, and in a quarter of the studies. There was no difference between the levels of productivity in cooperative and competitive classrooms.
Last, the lecture discredits the idea that a competitive classroom is fun, specifically that games and sports like spelling bees and science projects are more interesting and entertaining. The professor argues that in the past, it was fun to play, but currently, the emphasis is on winning, and it is only fun for those who manage to beat their fellow students in the competition. The lecture makes a case for students having the opportunity to compete against themselves to improve their scores.
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