Once again today I was approached by a colleague bearing a Chinese-produced English test paper. He had two queries.

One question read

"The child ____________ because he __________ his mother.

a) cried, missed
b) was crying, missed
c) was crying, was missing
d) cried, was missing"

Which, he asked, was correct.

The trouble, as usual, is that all four of those answers form perfectly grammatical sentences in English. The precise circumstances of their use might vary slightly but none of them are wrong.

The second question was one where the student had to fill the blank with an appropriate form of the given verb.

"He __________(leave) his job last September and he _____________ (work) in another city now."

Nothing hard about the first one. Clearly the form is "left". What about the second one? Either "works" or "is working" seems to fit the bill perfectly. Leaving aside subtleties about whether "works" applies to a permanent position and "is working" to a more temporary one, both versions are perfectly fine.

How does anyone ever pass an English exam in China?

I couldn't explain either of them adequately. I just had to shrug and say that, once again, the questions as phrased were, in my opinion, impossible to answer.

Every one of the first ones I could have chosen. Which was supposed to be correct?

b

That's probably the one I would have selected, but clearly all would work.

What educators do a really poor job at, I think, is establishing reliability for their exams. Their Cronbach Alphas would be awful for this exam, and they'd have to toss it.

Ask a pineapple

Let's not be so quick to judge. Everything I've learned came from a talking pineapple.

quote:

Originally posted by bethree5:
Ask a pineapple

That's a great article.
I've long held that there are some things that are just too important to be driven by the profit motive and that education is one of them
Here in China the problem is the opposite. The profit motive isn't driving schools, the government's political agenda is - and this can have both positive and negative consequences.
Among the positive are the drive to educate as many children as possible to a high level and the willingness to employ foreign experts (their term, not mine )) in appropriate fields. The negatives of course include the levels of political indoctrination and the the insistence that EVERY student entering a Chinese University must pass the English section of the entrance exam - a subject that may be of little or no relevance in some areas.

I'm told that exam papers and test papers here are produced either city by city or county by county but, in the case of the English exams, they do not have a body of trained native speakers to assess the quality which leads to the kind of thing I post about from time to time.
Perhaps, in this case, a giant talking Pineapple like Pearson would have some benefit. It might at last ensure that the questions are actually answerable.

Interesting article, Bethree, and an exemplary point. Why we focus so much on test scores is just beyond me. Scientifically, there has never been much relationship between test scores and either school or career outcomes.