Essay on Persuasive Speech

Submitted By Danielle-David
Words: 794
Pages: 4

Attention: Take a deep breath. Forget about the books and the scantrons for as long as you can and focus on these words. Forget about the finals you may have bombed and the curves you didn’t get.
Thesis: I'd like to show you all that grades really do not matter. Now is the time to get started so that we can enjoy the benefits of not caring about grades.

I'm assuming that none of you will argue that good grades are harmful. You'll agree that A’s are beneficial. However, I'm not so sure all of us are actually proactive studiers. I'd like to tell you, then, not how to study, but to persuade you to stop caring

Transition (First, I'd like to tell you why I'm so concerned about grades.)

Thought Pattern: PROBLEM-SOLUTION Problem: I. Lack of high scores in high school determines how well you will do in college.

A. To prove this point, think about how important your SAT scores are to you now. When was the last time you needed to use your SAT score to get something? Now remember how much they mattered to you at one point
B. High school marks don’t even predict how well you will do in first-year university, says James Parker, who holds the Canada Research Chair in emotion and health at Trent University. “In our culture, high school marks are the most important thing,” he says. “Yet if you look at success in first year, high school marks don’t predict that very well.”
C. A decade ago, Parker started tracking students who arrived at Trent in first year and found that high school marks don’t even predict who’s going to drop out.

(Statistically, then, if you do well in high school it does not mean you will succeed in college.)

Transition (Now some of you might be wondering why I'm trying to convey this message to a bunch of overachievers who are already past their undergraduate education.)

B. So this begs the question, do grades really even matter in business school?

1. Jerry Goolsby, who directs the MBA program at Loyola University refers to MBA degrees becoming "largely irrelevant because of dumbing down of the curriculum and grade inflation,"

2. When Elle Kaplan CEO at Lexion Capital Management in New York, evaluates prospective associates she focuses on candidates' passions and professional achievements, rather than their GPAs.

3. The strong opinions of business professionals regarding grades prove that they may not really be that important after all.

Transition (Now that I have discussed how high school grades don’t matter and how our grades this year are not that important lets move onto the future)

D. Job experience comes first in deciding whether a candidate is suitable for a position.
1. Ultimately, employers want to hire someone they feel will be able to get the job done. No employer wants to hover over your shoulder all day when they should be handling their own workload. Most employers would