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GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Failure

2 GAMSAT-style prompts on failure. Each gives you five comments that disagree, so your job is to find the tension and argue a clear position. Give yourself about 30 minutes per essay.

Task B · ReflectivePrompt 1 of 2

Consider the following comments on failure.

  • Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

    Samuel Beckett

  • Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

    Anonymous

  • There is no failure except in no longer trying.

    Elbert Hubbard

  • Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

    Robert F. Kennedy

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

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Task B · ReflectivePrompt 2 of 2

Consider the following comments on failure.

  • Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

    Samuel Beckett

  • Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

    Anonymous

  • We are taught to extract a lesson from every failure, as if pain owed us a receipt.

  • Some failures teach, and some only wound, and the cruelty is that we cannot always tell which until much later.

  • The hardest part of failing is not the fall, it is meeting the person you privately thought you were.

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

A way into this prompt

A reflective thesis worth exploring is that the real injury of failure is rarely the lost outcome but the collision with our private image of ourselves. Open by acknowledging the redemptive narrative, the comforting idea that every setback is a lesson in disguise. Then resist it gently: not all failure instructs, and the demand that it always must can be its own quiet cruelty, billing pain for a wisdom it never delivers. A second move might sit with the specific shame of failing at something we had staked our identity on. Caution: avoid the motivational platitude that failure is simply success in progress, since that slogan rushes past the grief that has to be felt before anything can be learned.

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More themes to practise

AcceptanceAgeingAmbitionAngerArtArtificial intelligenceAuthorityAutomationBeautyBelonging
See all prompt themes