Freaky Friday

[mothwing]

Want to see something scary?

One of my students failed his last English exam - he got a 6, the worst mark on the German grading system. Very concerned, my boss and I asked him to bring it along, because we wanted to see what on earth could have gone so wrong - he'd been steadily improving, and his last written exam had been a (weakish) 4.

And then we saw the exam paper.
After getting together and poring over the thing together for a couple of minutes, we also have a pretty clear idea about:

1.) why our student failed,
2.) the age of his teacher,
3.) the up-to-dateness of his teaching methods,
4.) how tech-savvy the guy is
5.) which English book is his favourite (I'm thinking this one).

Look: 



Most of the problems the student had resulted from not being able to make sense of the questions - well, obviously, they're seventh graders, and it's 2010, not 1970, for heaven's sake!

Comments

[aixa.livejournal.com]

Ok, I speak English natively and I haven't got a clue what this means. This is the test? What are the questions? I get the last paragraph, and that seems ok (minus that whole bit about the address and exchange teacher- who cares?), but the rest I don't even understand what the student is supposed to do. Fix the sentence? This test makes me feel stupid, and I speak English!

[lordhellebore]

But what the student is supposed to do is stated rather clearly in the tasks... The first three ones are about grammar.

@ Moth: I wouldn't give this to a 7th-grader, though, because the abbreviations are har to understand. Other than that, I see nothing really terrible. Could have been one of my tests at school.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

D=

Please tell me that this could have been one of your tests at school in Latin. This is a terrible test, and it's only clear if you're familiar with the format. From your Latin class, or a similar grammar-heavy class.

[lordhellebore]

Not Latin, but English and German.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

D=

With a similarly godawful format, or just the content?

[lordhellebore]

There were proper tasts like: "Transform these sentences into the past and past perfect." And there were no such horrible abbreviations that made the words almost irrecognisable.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not a big fan of that, either, as it seems kinda user-unfriendly, but that's at least somewhat more like it, at least. I mean what's up with those abbreviations? It's as though the guy has to pay a typist per character or something.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

The lines after A, B, and C are the questions. Students are supposed to transform the sentences from active to passive, to form sentences using forms in past and past perfect, and to transform the sentences from direct to indirect speech and vice versa. Yeah, and text production.

[aixa.livejournal.com]

Well, I did figure that out eventually, but it seems like a really awkward way of writing it. In any case, I can understand why the kid didn't do well on the test.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

It's terrible formatting, a terrible way of framing the questions, and I don't know what the guy has against extra line breaks- it's not as though the stuff wouldn't have fit on the page otherwise.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Oh, and it defnitely made me feel stupid, too, especially the stupid abbreviations. I don't get what this is for, really. There are so many better ways of testing.

W.T.F.

[rizardofoz.livejournal.com]

That is a horrible test with confusing directions. You want the students to understand and do well on a test, not be confused and fail. It even took ME a while to understand what the hell the first part was about, and I'd taught English grammar for two years!

Re: W.T.F.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Right? Also, people ought to make sure that their tests actually test what they want the students to know - and this test, most of all, tests whether the students can decrypt these directions and then have enough of their wits about them to transform weirdly out of context individual sentences.
This particular student can do all of these things just fine, he just needs exercises that make sense.

[count-tygath.livejournal.com]

What the heck does "+ pos." mean in a couple of places? - And "no ch. of tense"? - That's where I'm kinda lost.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

"No change of tense" and "positive", as opposed to the negated sentence they're given.

Yeah.

[count-tygath.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Why write this down clearly if there's also a complicated and almost unrecognizable way of saying it, hmm? - Seriously. :D

[rizardofoz.livejournal.com]

"POS" can also mean "part of speech" - at least in my grammar lexicon. ARGH!