It has recently been announced that a new high school may be built in your community. Do you support or oppose this plan? Why? Use specific reasons and details in your answer. (Full Score)

TOEFL Writing Sample: It has recently been announced that a new high school may be built in your community. Do you support or oppose this plan? Why? Use specific reasons and details in your answer. (Full Score)

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A new high school would enable the students to enjoy modern facilities. The school near my apartment is very old and there are some big problems because the water supply isn’t very good. If the city decides to build a new high school, they could use the old school building for a community center. That would be another benefit that might come from building a new school.

Also, there are many young students in the area and they will soon need a better place to complete their high school studies. Otherwise, they will be at a disadvantage when they apply to college. If the high school has a bad reputation, then it is more difficult for students from there to attend a good university. Maybe if the facilities in the new school are more up-to-date, the students can learn better — especially if they are studying science or computer technology.

A new high school would also create many jobs in our community. Because there are many young students in middle and primary schools, there will need to hire new teachers in the new high school. There will also need to be more help with maintaining the new sports fields, etc. Of course the construction will take a while and many workers will have jobs for that period of time.

Since there is very little money for the teachers at the current high school they often need to bring in school supplies that they paid for themselves. I don’t think that would be fair and I hope that the new school will also have a bigger budget so that the teachers can order supplies from a warehouse instead of buying pens and paper with their own money in order to help the students learn quickly.

[295 words]

Notes:

1. All of the prompts are from former TOEFL exams.
2. The information available online, i.e., Google search results, is either misleading or wrong relative to length: [an organization] states independent essays should be between 280-320 words. More words than needed is equivalent to more opportunities to make a mistake. Students should be informed re: word count, i.e., MORE WORDS does not mean a higher score.
3. Information concerning paragraphs/content available from [a TOEFL training school], etc. is also wrong: the number of paragraphs is irrelevant and the only important issue re: content is to RESPOND DIRECTLY to the prompt, i.e., the raters/software doesn’t care about structure or content except the latter must Make sense and Must directly respond to the prompt [to preclude prepared essays].
4. UK usage/spelling is entirely acceptable.
5. AVOID complex grammar; avoid ‘Chinese English’ usage; 5 tenses: present, past, future, present perfect [have done/has been], and conditional [would go/could do it] are OPTIMAL.
6. Don’t rewrite the prompt in the first paragraph of your essay…it’s okay to paraphrase [use words that mean the same thing].
7. Recent TOEFL change…students found test takes too long, so there are fewer multiple-choice questions, i.e., essays are now more heavily ‘weighted’]