[TOEFL] CLASSMATES WIN HANDS DOWN ON THEIR INFLUENCE ON CHILDREN'S SCHOOL SUCCESS!

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Classmates are more important influence than parents on a child's success in school.
Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
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big impact of classmates on other kids at school

At the time children attend school, they are so impressionable that many different factors can act upon them, including parents and classmates. While some hold that parents contribute mainly to the children's school success, some refute by claiming classmates exert more influence than parents on a their success. In my opinion, children are more under influence from classmates than parents in terms of their overall school achievements.

First of all, getting some advice from classmates is more convenient than from parents. The fact boils down to the existence of age gap. Parents, who are times older than their children, can get over-critical of their children's problems. It is mainly because they have no instant idea of how to tackle them as they experienced the problem so long ago. Meanwhile, turning for class fellows for consultancy seems more flexible. They are mostly at the same age, and they might have overcome such problems in recent times that they know immediately how to deal with them. Besides, classmates know clearly that they are in the period of accumulating experiences. That is the reason why they are not critical of our problems as some of the parents might do. To illustrate, take a close look at my cousins. When he confronted an issue on whether to join a club at school, he showed no willingness to talk about it to their parents because he was afraid that his parents would deter him. He, however, had a great conversation with his friends about it. The result was, indeed, far from astounding: He eventually got into the club, and his parents was highly convinced by his persuasion which was also prepared by his classmates that they allowed him to join the club.

Secondly, children tend to have more daily contact with classmates than with parents. The majority of children these days has to spend more than half of their day at school to fully cover the level of knowledge that they are required to accomplish. It means although they have more lessons, they also have more short intervals between lessons to unwind and hang out with friends. In the long run, as they have hung out long enough with their friends, they will develop a close tie. Being close-tied may make them passively and unintentionally imitate some, either good or bad, habits from each other. Undoubtedly, this can possibly heavily afflict with their attitudes towards studying, depending on what kind of classmate they befriend. On comparison, it is evident that parents exert less influence on the study progress of their children, however parents spend on tutoring them. As a matter of fact, some of the parents have not even come home by the time their children are back for the sake of their workloads. To illustrate, an experiment was conducted by the University of Chicago on the amount of time parents spend with their kids compared to their classmates. The researchers pointed out that most children are with their parents approximately 2 times less than with their classmates. Concerning the overwhelming amount of time that classmates have on a child, it is safe to say that classmates have a considerable impact on the school success of children, as well as their schooling progress.

In the final analysis, classmates have a greater influence on children's school success than parents do. Classmates contact face-to-face with children more frequently on a daily basis than parents, and getting advice from classmates is more flexible than from parents.

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THIS IS MY VERY FIRST ESSAY, SO I HOPE YOU GUYS LEAVE ME SOME FEEDBACK, SO I CAN IMPROVE MY WRITING STYLES! THANK YOU!

I think the topic sentence for the first argument doesn't summarize the paragraph. Maybe it's better with something like "children are more likely to accept the advice from classmates" :)

Whoah Johnny! The essay that you wrote is not one that is easy to keep track of discussion wise and doesn't properly address the prompt requirement either. The instruction was for you to agree or disagree with the statement provided. As I read your essay, what became clear is that your essay was discussing a prompt that you created in relation to your opinion regarding the given statement. That shows a lack of understanding of the prompt requirement and, while the line of reasoning can still be used for the original prompt, the problem, is that you showed a lack of English comprehension skills in terms of being able to follow given instructions. You must only discuss an essay in the manner dictated by the original instructions. So your last sentence in your opening paragraph should have reflected an agreement with the given statement before you launched into the relevant discussion that you created.

By the way, your body paragraphs should never be longer than 5 sentences long. In the actual test setting, you will have only 30 minutes to complete this task. Which means you only have 10 minutes to outline your essay, another 10 minutes to draft, and another 10 to finalize. Bearing in mind the steps required for the writing process, you will not have enough time to write this many words during the actual test. Practice developing only one reason per paragraph. That means, the topic sentence is at the start and then the rest of the paragraphs are the supporting reasons. Don't go beyond 5 sentences each. Learn to create cohesive and coherent paragraphs. That is what your presentation lacks at the moment.

As for the discussion you provided, you decided to get all technical in your presentation when a simple representation of your personal experience and reasons in relation to the given topic would have been the best way to defend your stance. In the TOEFL essay, more weight is given to exam takers who can use personal experiences in their presentation because this shows a deeper understanding of the prompt requirements and allows the students to better express themselves in English.

Keep the paragraphs short but informative. Use personal statements whenever possible. Those are some of the key traits you have to develop if you want to gain a better final TOEFL score.