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

[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.