Part I: Summarize the following passage in 100-150 words. When using more than five consecutive words from the passage, please avoid plagiarism by placing these words within quotation marks. (20%)
In the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, countless colleges and universities shifted from to A-F grades to a pass/fail system. As offieials at Wellesley College explained, the general aim in doing so is to "support one another without being required to make judgments." As teachers in Wisconsin's Madison Metropolitan School District declared, "We cannot grade with equity when students' experiences learning at home will be so varied. And it's not yet clear that most schools that have made this switch will fully return to letter grades in the fall.
But not everyone is happy with this outcome. Some parents and activists are anxious that, without grades, students won't receive adequate feedback on their work. Others wory that altering or eliminating the traditional grading scale will undermine student motivation and reward slacking off. The logistical calamities presented by the coronavirus have suddenly, and forcefully, surfaced an underlying problem frequently ignored before the crisis: A-F grades serve several different purposes, and those purposes are too often in conflict with one another. Americans may come to recognize by the end of this schooling crisis that we would all be better off without letter grades. The original aim of grading, which can be traced back several centuries to English universities like Oxford and Cambridge, was to motivate students. As educators found, students tended to work harder if there was a brass ring for them to reach. This fact bccame more important in the latter half of the 19th century, as an increasing number of states made schooling compulsory.
Grades as we know them now have yet another origin too, rooted in efforts to communicate with students and their families. Feedback, as any educator knows, is essential to learning. But as class sizes grew larger in the 19th century, American teachers were increasingly pressed for time. Looking for a shortcut, many schools developed new systems for providing feedback to students. The boldest of these physically rearranged students in the classroom - hence the phrase 'head of the class."' What endured, however, was the "report card," which used pre-identified codes - like numbers or letter grades - to streamline the process of evaluation.
Unlike student seating charts, report cards could be sent home to parents, strengthening communication with families. And eventually, policy leaders realized that if grades could relate something about student learning to parents and families, they could also communicate info more broadly -- to other schools, to state offices of education and to employers.
Standardized report cards, in essence, could create a national market for student knowledge and skill, in the same way that letter grades for products like grain had created commodities markets. Just as the quality of Grade A beef could be understood without firsthand knowledge, so could the quality of an A student. With the evolution of the transcript -- the permanent record for storing grades -- student performance could be communicated across both time and space.
(From https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-school-grades.htmlsearchResultPosition=6)
Part III. Write an essay of 300 words to express your opinions on the requirement of A-F grades for students in language learning.(30%)
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