GRE Issue Essay: The Best Way for a Society to Prepare Its Young People for Leadership

Please critique my GRE essay. I truly appreciate your time and inputs. Thanks in advance!

The best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government, industry, or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.

Some value cooperation more, while some others value competition more. However, the truth is, both of them are important, and people should never advocate just one of them, since in any enterprise, cooperation and competition are always there. Especially for the young people of today, to instill in them a sense of both cooperation and competition is even more important.

Competition is surely very important. There is nowhere more obvious to show this in sports. As a caption of a basketball team in a school, she has to try the best to organize her team to beat the other team. At this point, between the two opposing team, to compete to see who is better is vitally important. It is the same for leaders of different countries. As a leader of China, for example, the president need to do his best to get more benefits for his own country. She will have to negotiate with leaders from other countries and reach the best deals. It is a competition of wisdom, confidence and courage. The world tomorrow will not be totally different with today, the competition will be still facing the leaders in government, industry, or any other fields.

To prepare young people to love competition is not only necessary, but also very important, for the enterprises they lead, to say the least, and for the whole industry or society, to say it at large. For example, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, must always lead his company to design the best iPhones. The reason is not only that he just loves to improve the quality of their products, but also he must always have their competitors such as Samsung in mind. Only because of the competition, and only because Tim Cook have to compete with other companies, Apple keeps making better iPhones. And as their customers, people can benefit from their competitions.

However, just let the young people know the importance of competition is not the whole story. Some people will argue that while competition is important, cooperation is more important today. At the present time, few people know all the tricks or have the ability to finish one single project. I certainly agree with that. Let's take China and the US for example. China and the US are competing in almost every aspect, such as in business, military power, and political systems. However, the two countries have to cooperate as well. Apple's products are designed in the US, but made in Chinese factories. So the two countries must not just compete.

While I agree cooperation is important, I will not go so far as to say that we should only promote cooperation in young people. The point is to let them to know both competition and cooperation are important. They should learn how to do well in both so that they can be true leaders of tomorrow.

Jianfeng, I wish you had better developed your opening statement to provide a cleared view of the essay prompt and your point of view on the topic. I understand you were writing under time constraint, but the opening statement is a huge part of the score in the test and when you provide an opening statement that does not contain the complete requirements, your score will not be very good for the overall test.

Now, as far as the main content of your essay, you seem to have focused too much on the superficial aspect of the discussion. That of the question of market leadership and country supremacy in the world. While those are the most obvious go-to discussions for this type of prompt, I believe that you should have gone beyond the obvious in this discussion and looked into the deeper meaning of leadership.

There should have been a clear discussion of how learning to cooperate with one another, instead of constantly competing, producers better leaders in the world. Remember, the essay wants you to discuss your point of view from the aspect of governance and government leadership. As we both know, government leadership will fail once there is no cooperation among the government leaders and departments. Your discussion centered too much on the commercial aspects of leadership which is why you mistakenly strengthened your discussion of the competition aspect.

While I agree that competition is good for the world economies, learning to cooperate with your competitors and other nations provides a bigger benefit for the country and company. Shared intellectual knowledge and product development results only in better markets and governance in any nation.

Your discussion of the need for cooperation in the essay is not properly represented nor balanced. You left it for the very last paragraph of discussion, so that thought was not as thoroughly explained and supported in your essay as the competition side. Perhaps you can revise the essay to produce a more balanced discussion? Your conclusion should actually reflect that there should be a balance between the competitive spirit and the spirit of cooperation in any form of governance.

Thanks a lot, @vangiespen. I've always found your comments inspiring and constructive. I agree with you that my essay should have been more to the point, more balanced, and more comprehensive. I will definitely work on that.