In this part of the assignment, please evaluate the following "student's" essay. After the essay, you will be given a set of critiques and you must identify whether each of those critiques are valid. Disagreeing with the author's essay is not a valid critique.

This is a TRUE or FALSE test.

Enter "TRUE" if VALID, and
"FALSE" if "NOT VALID"

The student was given the following prompt:

Please write a single page essay answering the question: In what manner and to what extent does the Supreme Court have the power to protect minorities? Your analysis should be based on causal reasoning. The first sentence of every paragraph must be an argument, and the body should contain evidence that is necessary to make that argument.

The first sentence of the entire essay should summarize the argument for the entire essay. The second sentence should give a sense of the outline of the main arguments in each of the paragraphs.

You must use your judgment to focus on the strongest counterarguments for your main claims; glaring omissions of evidence of the reading would be a valid critique.

You should avoid:

making normative arguments or statements
interpreting textual evidence
inferential errors: mixing the types of arguments and appropriate evidence
irrelevant information
logical fallacies
factual errors

Download the essay here.