Blog 5

Joshua Ajayi

In this week's class in public speaking, we are talking about and arguing debates. She spit us up In 2 teams of three and gave us a topic and assigned which team was pro and which team was con, and so we had to debate about the given topic. We were given 30 seconds for our opening and the other team was given 30 seconds for their opening. We were then given 30 seconds for a rebuttal and likewise the other team. And then lastly we were given 30seconds for our closing statements. This activity In my opinion taught us how to speedily gather our arguments and come up with valid points to use in the debate. The topic we were given to research and debate was "should grades be abolished" and also "should people be fined for not recycling". I am going to present the pro and cons for both topics. To begin with, I'm going to talk about the first topic, "should grades be abolished". There are a couple of reasons why grades should be abolished. For once, the notion that the harder you work, the higher your grades will be is not necessarily true. Grades do not measure one's intelligent, it only measures ones academic ability. "  And to have a certain GPA as a prerequisite for admission is wrong.
  Some students may be very deserving of admission, yet not have high enough grades. And grade inflation, which is not uncommon, makes it easy for students who are mediocre or worse to have what looks likes impressive grades.
   And not only does grade inflation exist, but its exact opposite happens,too.  In courses where there are no cut and dried correct answers, grading is often highly arbitrary and subjective. Sometimes, a student can be very bright and hard working, yet teachers or professors can show extremely poor judgement in grading, and give low  grades for outstanding work." An article online on why grading should be abolish. Also stated in the article "a student may have absolutely no control over the grade he or she gets in a course, and work extremely hard, yet receive only a lousy C, or even a D, while other students in the class who put no more than a tiny fraction of the effort in,and have minimal academic ability will get As and Bs." The con of having grades abolished is that students would have to motivation or desire to do well and or thrive because they know they will not be graded. They would slack off in the class room and put In minimal effort.
The next topic is, should people be fined for not recycling. The pros of this is that this would improve the environment significantly. It would also benefit people that recycle because they get a little extra money from recycling. The con of this is that Recycling should be treated as a bonus, not as a requirement. It promotes sustainability of our Earth, but it is unjust to fine people for refusing to save the environment.