In some classes, course grades are based solely on exams, while in other classes, grades are based more on class participation than on exams. Which type of grading do you prefer? Use specific reasons to support your response.
Grading system is one of the important thing in educational system. Usually, such educator as a teacher and lecturer determine their students’s grade based only on their point in exams. I believe that grade which based on class participation is better than that on exams. The main reason is that we cannot measure our students’s ability just because of their exams’s grade. In addition, class participation is important to evaluate the students’s mastery regarding some class materials.
To begin with, students’s ability cannot be fully determined just by their point in exams. There is one problem we have to face when we want to evaluate our students’s ability by an exam : Cheating. Cheating is one problem we have not solved yet. For example, when we give them an exam, we cannot be sure whether our students did the exam by themselves or not. Our students might cheat in the exam when we did not pay attention to them. That is why, in my opinion exam’s grade cannot be fully used to evaluate students’s ability about the course.
What is more, class participation requires the students to elaborate their ideas as fast and much as possible about the topic presented. Beside that, they have to build their critical thinking concerning the topic when they have to participate in the class discussion. They have to “understand” the topic rather than merely memorized the topic. For example, some students with the high point in the exam may not be able to explain more about the topic since when they studied, they just “memorized” the textbook and did not try to “understand” the topic. Therefore, we can evaluate their ability better by seeing their participation and ideas in the class discussion or presentation than by giving them an exam.
In conclusion, I think that course grades based on class participation is better than that based on exams. Grades are not only about their point, but also their ability to explore their idea by participating in class discussions or presentations.
– longman iBT preparation writing independent task. I am in the middle of iBT preparation 
Filed under: essay, class participation, exams, grading system
