i just finished zhaozhiguo's linguistic class. again we were told about the new reform of grading policy. the final test will only account for 40%, and there have to be at least 3 homeworks a semester and they will acount for the other 60%. Obiviously, dean geng had made it a big issue, because every teacher keep mentioning it with a solemn look since Monday. (i heard they had a meeting last friday). well, it's not even a big deal to our students, why have all the teachers taken it so seriously? to us, it's just a couple times of homeworks which i think is a requirement. but to the teachers, it means grading hundreds of papers or other forms of homeworks. but apparently most teachers have been used to just planning classes and giving classes (or in some rare cases, just giving classes). Therefore, when some students started complaining about still having homework in senior year and which would take too much precious kaoyan time, teachers have already complained about  so many coming homeworks to grade secretly. while some teachers might just ask students to do the exercises on the textbook which every student have keys to the answers in the reference books, and thus the teachers will have less work to do. some others like our advanced english teacher just ask students to recite an article in our advanced english textbook and she will randomly call a few students and ask them to recite and grade them on that. some even come up with the idea that they will ask student to do homework every time but just grade a dozen once, thus everystudent get an averaged score no matter your homework have been graded 3 times or just once, this is a relatively smarter way. they do give homework and give each student scores yet they do not have to grade too much homework.It is said that the purpose the reform is to encourage and make students learn more in class, because dean geng said in the meeting that the final test which students could cram for by concentrated memorizing was meaningless. I just doubt if the new way will reach its expected aim. Anyway, not all teachers are complaining, some open teachers like my linguistic teacher mr. zhao is one of the minority. He is really in support, because he has asked us to write 3 papers about linguistics in this semester. More specifically, he askes us to do the first part of the graduation disertation---to read others thesis about one linguistic point and write a summary of its developement in recent 10 or 20 years and add one or two sentences about your own view of this point. That requires a lot of reading and searching for informations. Of course it also requires him to grade about 800 papers this semester. And he said no cheating which means no plagerizing when it comes to writing papers. He said plagerisation is like thefty to civilised people.