2019年12月英语六级长篇阅读模拟题(三)
四级成绩什么时候出 Passage Three
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Higher Grades Challenge College Application Process
A) Josh Zalasky should be the kind of college applicant with little to worry about. The high school nior is taking three Advanced Placement cours. Outside the classroom, he，s involved in mock trial, two Jewish youth groups and has a job with a restaurant chain. He，s a National Merit mifinalist and scored in the top ? percent of all students who take the ACT.
B) But in the increasingly frenzied world of college admissions, even Zalasky is nervous about his prospects. He doubts he#ll get into the University of Wisconsin, a top choice. The reason： his grades. It$s not that they%re bad. It&s that so many of his classmates are so good. Zalasky’s GPA is nearly an A minus, and yet he ranks only about in the middle of his toefl官网
nior class of 543 at Edina High School outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. That means he will have to find other ways to stand out.
look up C) “It’s extremely difficult,” he said. “I spent all summer writing my essay. We even hired a private tutor to make sure that essay was the best it can be. But even with that, it’s like I*m just kind of leveling the playing field.” Last year, he even considered transferring out of his highly competitive public school, to some place where his grades would look better.
D) Some call the phenomenon that Zalasky’s fighting “grade inflation”—implying the boost is underved. Others say students are truly earning their better marks. Regardless, it’s a trend that’s been building for years and may only be accelerating： many students are getting very good grades. So many, in fact, it is getting harder and harder for colleges to u grades as a measuring stick for applicants.
E) Extra credit for AP cours, parental lobbying and genuine hard work by the most competitive students have combined to shatter any mblance of a Bell curve, one in which A，s are rerved only for the very best. For example, of the 47,317 applications th两星期
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e University of California, Los Angeles, received for this fall’s freshman class, nearly 23,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above.
F) That’s also making it harder for the most lective colleges—who often call grades the single most important factor in admissions—to join in a growing movement to lesn the influence of standardized tests.考博英语真题
G) “We，re eing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high school becau they don，t want to create the distinctions between students,” said Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “ If we don’t have enough information, there’s a chance we’ll become more heavily reliant on test scores, and that’s a real negative to me.”
H) Standardized tests have endured a heap of bad publicity lately, with the SAT raising anger about its expanded length and recent scoring problems. A number of schools have stopped requiring test scores, to much fanfare.
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I) But lost in the developments is the fact that none of the most lective colleges have dropped the tests. In fact, a national survey shows overall reliance on test scores is higher in admissions than it was a decade ago. “It’s the only thing we have to evaluate students that will help us tell how they compare to each other,” said Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.
J) Grade inflation is hard to measure, and experts，caution numbers are often misleading becau standards and scales vary so widely. Different practices of “weighting” GPAs for AP work also play havoc. Still, the trend ems to be showing itlf in a variety of ways.
周杰伦明明就mv K) The average high school GPA incread from 2.68 to 2.94 between 1990 and 2000, according to a federal study. Almost 23 percent of college freshmen in 2005 reported their average grade in high school was an A or better, according to a national survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Rearch Institute. In 1975, the percentage was about half that.
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L) GPAs reported by students on surveys when they take the SAT and ACT exams have also rin—and faster than their scores on tho tests. That suggests their classroom grades aren’t rising just becau students are getting smarter. Not surprisingly, the test-owners say grade inflation shows why testing should be kept： it gives all students an equal chance to shine.
M) The problems associated with grade inflation aren’t limited to elite college applicants. More than 70 percent of schools and districts analyzed by an education audit company called SchoolMatch had average GPAs significantly higher than they should have been bad on their standardized test scores—including the school systems in Chicago, Illinois, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Denver, Colorado, San Bernardino, California, and Columbus, Ohio. That rais concerns about students graduating from tho schools unprepared for college. “They get mixed in with students from more rigorous schools and they just get blown away,” said SchoolMatch CEO William Bainbridge.
N) In Georgia, high school grades ro after the state began awarding HOPE scholarshi
ps to students with a 3.0 high school GPA. But the scholarship requires students to keep a 3.0 GPA in college, too, and more than half who received the HOPE in the fall of 1998 and entered the University of Georgia system lost eligibility before earning 30 credits. Next year, Georgia is taking a range of steps to tighten eligibility, including calculating GPA itlf rather than relying on schools, and no longer giving extra GPA weight to vaguely labeled “honors” class.
