[originaltext]W: Hello, Patrick. What are you busy doing?M: Nothing serious. W

W: Hello, Patrick. What are you busy doing?
M: Nothing serious. What’s wrong, Lily?
W: I just want to talk about something with you.
M: I’m glad to. What is it?
W:(5-1)You know, we have homework and tests. What about attendance? Should we require students to attend classes? Sometimes people argue at university level it shouldn’t be compulsory.
M: I think you should attend some classes at least. You’re going to university: you’re paying for your education so you should attend some classes, but it doesn’t mean if you’re not attending a class, you cannot get the information and study by yourself.(1)That’s why I like Internet so much, because I think people can get so much information from academic institutions via the Internet: they don’t have to attend a physical class.
W: That’s right and on the other hand, you might attend physically but you’re not really paying attention.
M: Exactly. You might as well sleep in class sometimes. It doesn’t prove that you’re learning if you’re there. It depends on the person I think.
W:(5-2)So maybe rather than strictly checking attendance, we should check what the students have learned?
M: Yes, and how do you do that?
W: Now we come back to that.
M: Testing? I don’t know. I think there are other ways of finding out if students have learned things.(2)You don’t have to call things tests: you can set students tasks to find out if they can do the required tasks without calling them tests.
W: That’s right, and then it becomes maybe a bit more practical too.
M: Yeah, I think so.
W: Did you do a lot of projects when you were a student?
M: Not so many, and I think education has quite changed in the last twenty years or so.(3)I think students are doing more projects than we used to do when I was a student for the first time, but I really like projects because I think it’s putting your knowledge to work and finding out how you can apply your knowledge to make it practical and usable. I wish I could give my students more projects.
W: Yeah, that’s true. Maybe they’ll be better than tests.
M: I think so too, yeah. It’s a better way to find out if people know things if you give them a project that involves what they’ve studied.
W:(4)And in the real life they won’t be taking tests any more. They need to be able to apply the knowledge, right?
M: Yeah, exactly. Do you use projects a lot in your class?
W: Not as much. As you know, we have quite a strict schedule to follow but I think it’s definitely something to think about.
M: Yeah, right. It’s kind of tricky to give a project in language, like making a language project.
W: Yeah, I guess.
1. What is Patrick’s viewpoint towards attendance?
2. How to check students’ learning performance according to Patrick?
3. What do students do more than they used to do when Patrick was a student?
4. What do students need to do in the real life mentioned by Lily?
5. What is the topic of the conversation?