The following appeared in a memo from the director of student housing at Buckingham College."To serve the housing needs of our students, Buckingham College should build a number of new dormitories. Buckingham's enrollment is growing and, based on current

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The following appeared in a memo from the director of student housing at Buckingham College.

"To serve the housing needs of our students, Buckingham College should build a number of new dormitories. Buckingham's enrollment is growing and, based on current trends, will double over the next 50 years, thus making existing dormitory space inadequate. Moreover, the average rent for an apartment in our town has risen in recent years. Consequently, students will find it increasingly difficult to afford off-campus housing. Finally, attractive new dormitories would make prospective students more likely to enroll at Buckingham."

Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.

With the information provided, the assumptions leading to the conclusion remains unfounded. The author uses the evidence that construction of new dormitories will provide better accommodation option to student hence will attract more prospective students to enroll at Buckingham College. However, the author makes a number of unproved assumptions that hamper reader's ability to believe author's conclusion. If the author was to provide more evidence to support the assumptions, the argument would be much more effective.

The primary assumption underlying author's conclusion is that the main reason behind enrolment of the students at Buckingham College is financial reason. But it might be true that students are interested in Buckingham College due to research lab, faculty and other academic facilities. Construction of new dormitories will affect the budget plan of the college and it could affect the fund allocated to research lab, faculty and other academic facilities. So, instead of more enrollment it will decrease the student's interest towards Buckingham College .To reinforce the argument author should have discussed about funding for construction of new dormitories, whether college has extra funding for the project or it will come through reduction in the budget of academic facilities.

Moreover author assumes that earlier a lot of student prefers to stay outside college but increase in the apartment price in town caused difficulty for students to afford costly apartment. But author has not mentioned about any data related to student's accommodation how many of them stays outside campus and how many of them stays in the campus. It might be possible that earlier most of the students are staying inside campus so they will not get affected by increase in the rent of outside apartment. To reinforce the argument author should have discussed about detail statistics of student's accommodation status.

The author further assumes that all of the campus accommodation is full and there is big problem to accommodate new students. But it might be possible that earlier most of the students stays outside campus and most of the inside accommodation is empty which can accommodate the new students. To reinforce the argument author should have discussed about number of new admitted students and number of empty dormitories in the campus so that it will become clear that whether new dormitories are required or not.

To Sum up, the author fails to substantiate his conclusion that new dormitories will attract more students to enroll at Buckingham College, because he has not given sufficient evidence to support his conclusion. He should have discussed about funding of new construction, detail data about student's accommodation status, current status of dormitories to substantiate his claim.

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Score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 17 15
No. of Words: 437 350
No. of Characters: 2347 1500
No. of Different Words: 173 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.572 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.371 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.883 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 199 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 153 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 104 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 67 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25.706 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.511 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.647 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.385 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.615 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.164 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5