The Tension of Tests

The English testing system over here is idiotic.

Today, I took a class of Third Year students through the rough equivalent of a dry run of their upcoming tests...although, they do so many a year that it's hard to know how decisive this particular run will be.

The procedure involves a simple greeting and maybe a few appropriately pitched questions. Then I hand them a small piece of text that may have come from a copy of "101 Paths: A Road Map to Good Citizenship". The student then reads this special brand of Japanese English and answers some utterly facile questions about what was written within. This done, the paper is discarded to make way for a couple of completely unrelated and confusing questions, before being returned to for a "what do you think?" section. There are two given answers, a positive and a negative, implied by the text and expected of a well behaved member of society.

Naturally, the students who did well in this little ballet are those I know to be diligent and capable. However, it's not their English prowess that is being stretched. The answers came verbatum from the sheet.

What is being measured here isn't an actual communicative skill; rather, it is the ability to spot hoops and jump through them.

By contrast, not an hour earlier, I had a Second Year class, where the little tykes were preparing for roughly the same thing. Being an academic year below the aforementioned class, you'd expect Second Years to have a lower ability...but surely, what marks competence in a foreign language is having the crutches and scaffolding removed, and actually being able to communicate. I had conversations with these students - we talked about their dreams. They understood questions that, as the textbook dictates, they shouldn't be able to answer.

Maybe the difference in each lesson lies in teaching method...