My English grades are probably worse than my chinese grades, but I resent the latter more. For one reason - when I look at the mistakes and inadequete standards I meet in english, I feel that I deserve it. Thus I accept this without qualms.
When I review why my answers are insufficient to answer a comprehension question, I can see for myself that there is a lack of logical flow. I can see that my essays lack developed vocabulary and organized structure. This is strange, but I feel a lot happier with my english grades than my chinese grades(which a probably slightly higher)
The mode of assessment of chinese here is rigid. I will not forget the time when I had a real good laugh upon reading a letter to the newspaper. It complained about the rigidity of science marking in the country in this era, by flashing an example in which a question, "What is the difference in the rate of evaporation of water in A and B?", was posed. A student, giving the answer: "B will evaporate faster because A has a smaller surface area", was marked wrong!
The "Model" answer was something along the lines of A will evaporate slower because B had a larger surface area et cetera. This is a rather extreme case.
Anyway, in chinese letter writing, the assessment is such that content marks are allocated based on how many points one writes down. i.e the paragraph count. It does not matter how well developed each idea is, how much elaboration and explanation it contains. It does not even matter how much it stands out an important and crucial point that no one else had though of.
One point just mean one content mark. Three reasons and three ways to solve the problem is required. Just two is not an option, no matter how good they are like I mentioned. And its letter writing, not a proposal of advocacy or analysis report.
This method of assessment destroys the fair advantage critical thinkers have over those who do plain memory work and 'mind-readers' (Those who writes what the teachers want to see).
That is only one issue. Another thing I feel uneasy about is the open-ended comprehension passages. Contrary to English assessment, where marks are scored, when one answers the question to the point, has the correct answer with a logical structure, in chinese this requires unnecessary elaboration which is irrelavant.
Take for example a standard 4 mark question. Should you just answer the question, the most you will obtain is two marks. The other two comes from the elaboration that revolves around the main answer. So it almost always ends up with a lot of ctrl-c ctrl v s from the passage.
There are times when elaboration is not needed and 4-5 marks are awarded straight for a one line answer. Yet the differences between them are almost impossible to tell.
Life is indeed unpredictable.
However the central problem lies in the choice of comprehension passage. Many times they just love to give passages that teach the reader some moral, or a lesson. Most of the time they are illogical and look as if they are written by a child. (Verified by trusted source) One can argue that my standard of comprehension is probably not high enough to attain the level of 'mind-reader', but again it is not so low as to be able to stoop down to their level and think from the writer's point of view. As such, I can't comprehend such passages.
Let me translate one such passage.
"Distance" brings about beauty. But why do we destroy such a dream? Humans, with their selfish desires, have destroyed the beauty of "distance, and have started to possess others by force. No longer now is the forest quiet, but it rings with the sound of gunshots, tigers face extinction. Never again will we see birds soaring in the air, or the fluffy white sheep roaming in the plains. But the humans feel that this distance must not be maintained, and they pick up their axes and saws, and start deforestating, destroying the 'distance' ,destroying their beautiful home...
...
The beauty of literature requires distance too. Have it not been for the long time that has passed since they have been written, will ancient poems still spark the endless imagination of mankind?....
...
But today, our fast paced society will destroy all the beauty of distance. Fast food culture has taken over the distance humans have always been longing in their hearts. Authors no longer pen classics, rather they mass produce hasty works, works that are not worth passing on for generations...
Yes, my translation is horrible, but thats approximately the idea of what kind of passages I get
I really hope that the setters of paper use news articles or articles regarding governmental policies to test us, rather than these sort of 'moral-instilling anecdotes'.
It is difficult to comprehend, and I do not mean that in a good way. Let's put it this way, when I do a difficult English comprehension question, I think hard, because I know an answer is there somewhere, waiting to be found. But here, it's like it can never be found.
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