题目内容：

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.

How Colleges Can Measure Up in Teaching “Critical Thinking”

After becoming president of Purdue University in 2013, Mitch Daniels asked the teaching staff to prove that their students have actually achieved one of higher education’s most important goals: critical thinking skills. 1. Mr. Daniels needed to justify the high cost of attending Purdue to its students and their families. After all, the percentage of Americans who say a college degree is “very important” has fallen dramatically in the last 5-6 years.

Purdue now has a pilot test to assess students’ critical thinking skills. 2. However, they need not worry so much. The results of a recent experiment showed that professors could use standard grading scale to measure how well students did in three key areas: critical thinking, written communication and language literacy.

3. The organizers of the experiment concluded that far fewer students were achieving at high levels on critical thinking than they were doing for written communication or language literacy. And that conclusion is based only on students nearing graduation.

American universities, despite their global reputation for excellence in teaching, have only begun to demonstrate what they can produce in real-world learning. Knowledge-based degrees are still important, but employers are demanding advanced thinking skills from college graduates. 4.

A. If the intellectual worth of a college degree can be accurately measured, more people will seek higher education―and come out better thinkers.

B. Two years before, a nationwide study of college graduates had shown that more than a third had made no significant gains in such mental abilities during their school years.

C. Despite the success of the experiment, the actual results are frustrating, and mostly confirm earlier studies.

D. Many can’t reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.

E. Yet like many college teachers in the U.S., the professors remain doubtful that their work as educators can be measured by a “learning outcome” such as a graduate’s ability to investigate and reason.

F. It is important to identify the common goals of general higher education and translate them into the design of the learning outcomes assessment.