(For my practice for English examination and this might be not my honest opinion.)
Q: Grades encourage students to learn. Agree or disagree?
I know that people have been struggling tough competition in their lives caused by our competitive society for a long time. Then, some people think this situation has negative effect on our motivation especially for children. In fact, in Japan, there is argument about whether grading students at school is suitable or not. In my opinion, I agree with this statement for the following two reasons.
To begin with, we can have our actual targets by getting grades from proper people like school teachers. For example, I have been to studying English specifically, TOEFL for a long time. I believe that TOEFL is tough examination for normal Japanese students but it can calculate our certain levels of English instead. Although increasing score is by no means easy for us but we can judge which part of our ability is our weakness. Then, we can try next stage to reach our goal by following our grades that we received. Thus, grading can encourage us and it can develop our abilities as well.
Secondly, by getting proper grades, we can judge whether our future job is suitable for us or not. For instance, when I was an elementary student, we had a class of physical education. In this class, we tried many sports such as baseball and basketball. In my case, unfortunately, I was terrible at most sports and got the worst grade. I was really depressed but there was one positive thing that I decided to give up those sports and pursue career in music instead. After the decision, I had devoted myself to music and made efforts a lot. As a result, I could become a professional music composer. Therefore, grading gives us a good opportunity to choose our suitable future occupations and it can encourage us as well.
To sum up, we can have actual targets to increase our skill and we can judge our suitable occupation by getting grades. For these two reasons, I agree with this statement that grades encourage students to learn.