While some will cry this is racism against Chinese students, it is not. The reality is that Chinese students are here only with permission of the Chinese government and are beholden in many ways to the ruling Chinese communist party:
The PRC exerts great pressure on Chinese immigrants even after they become U.S. citizens. One need only to look at the case of the head of R&D at Coca-Cola who was convicted of stealing trade secrets for China:
So yes, China is an economic rival and they go to great lengths to steal U.S. trade secrets. So why should we help educate the students of an economic and military rival?
Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.
While I do like TextEdit, I prefer Bean (https://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), which has been my quick word processor of choice on the Mac since the Tiger days.
This article references how grade inflation has boomed since 2013 (when the authors were in school). Here's an article from 2013 bemoaning grade inflation:
Folks, this is an annual grouching point among folks who care about or work in academia. Nothing to see here.
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Edited to add that I am a community college English professor. Most people pass my class because the college has set the final drop date one month before the end of the semester, so students have plenty of time to avoid a bad final grade.