I love the blue sky

Saturday, August 18, 2007
Examinations, Examinations... Wherefore Art Thou Examinations!

It's been a week since I last blogged. I've had a really busy week. Every day, I had to rush to another school with Azlina and Jolyn to conduct the GCE 'O' Level English Language Oral Examination. And every day, my team ended past 5pm - even as late as a quarter to six! I got home completely knocked out and unable to complete the target which I'd set for my heaps of marking.

That late session on Thursday was really the last straw. My team partner and I decided that we had to interrupt our candidates for three reasons.

Firstly, we need to be fair and kind to all candidates. Not everyone has an idea of how it feels to be the last candidate in an oral examination - watching your own friends entering the room and coming out after so long, and anxiously waiting for your turn to come. If we were to allow earlier candidates to ramble on senselessly, the poor last candidate has to wait for 3 whole hours (or even longer) before he or she gets to take the paper!

Secondly, we are actually saving the candidate from getting lousy grades by stopping him or her at the right time - that is, when he or she digresses - and either repeat the question or ask another question to help him or her to focus.

Last but not least, we need to stop ourselves from dozing off because, really, hearing irrelevant, boring stuffs really puts us off. Besides, after a long day of teaching, we don't even need melodious lullabies to lull our already-exhausted brains to rest, much less listen to monotonous monologues.

It makes me wonder how English Language teachers of other schools have prepared their pupils for this examination. As a teacher, I have taught my pupils what I expect to hear as an examiner. I'm sure other teachers do too. But herein lies the problem: Are we having different expectations as examiners? When a teacher of another school conducts the oral examination in my school, will he or she assess my pupils according to how he or she has taught his or her own pupils or how my colleagues in my school and I have taught our pupils? How do we know that all teachers in Singapore have taught the same things to our pupils?

And it's evident that we don't. If it were so, my team partner and I wouldn't be having such a hard time during the oral examination. =\

This brings me to the relevance of the oral briefing which all appointed EL oral examiners have to attend every year. Year in year out, we're being reminded of how to assess the candidates when what we really need is to be reminded of how NOT to encourage our pupils to ramble on and on senselessly. Why? Well, scroll back to read the three VERY REASONABLE AND BENEFICIAL explanations stated earlier. Isn't it just GOOD SENSE?

Because, in all honesty, as oral examiners, most (if not all of us) already know what grade to award to the candidate within the first 3 minutes of his or her reading and/or yakking. I think teachers should teach our pupils HOW TO FOCUS ON THE QUESTION ASKED (without digressing senselessly) rather than encouraging our pupils to insist on wanting to say what they have come up with during the 10 minutes of silent preparation.

Imagine a certain scenario: For picture discussion, a candidate answers the examiner's question in a couple of sentences without much elaboration and goes on to give irrelevant details of the peripherals of the picture (eg. how sunny the sky is and how green the grass is, and so on and forth). What the... ?!?!??!! How in the world do all these details answer the question?! If they do help in some ways in answering the question posed, fair enough.

But get this: If examiners do not even bother to interrupt the candidate, thus allowing him or her to ramble on senselessly, you can be sure that the marks awarded will be not impressive. On the other hand, if examiners do interrupt (I must emphasize: at the right time) and then repeat the question to help the candidate refocus, aren't we actually helping them to score better grades? There is a difference between heavy prompting and repeating of questions to help refocus the candidates, you know. A REALLY, REALLY BIG DIFFERENCE.

It works the same way for the conversation component - in fact, even more so. Why? Because it's here where most candidates have the tendency to go off tangent.

I had this candidate (from a couple of years back), whom upon being reminded of some upsetting past by an INNOCENT, HARMLESS examination question, got so affected that we couldn't make out whether she knew what she was saying because she was contradicting herself. Of course, we noticed that she was trying her best not to get affected, so we tried our best to understand her. At the end of the day though, we had to remind ourselves this was an examination and we were not from The Good Samaritans Examination Board of Assessment. We had already showed kindness by listening to her without trying to cut her off (which we thought might upset her even more). But you can be sure her marks weren't impressive. She passed definitely - since she was able to talk quite a bit and her sentence structures were pretty sound, but it wasn't the higher marks she was capable of getting. (Can you imagine how badly this candidate might have scored or failed if she had spoken in very bad sentence structures?!) As teachers, we could tell her potential. Unfortunately, examinations are all about making effective use of what you have learnt or prepared for an on-the-spot assessment like this. Examiners do not assess a candidate's potential, but his or her performance as exhibited.

In view of all this, it's really the teacher's responsibility to equip pupils with the skill to handle all sorts of situation - not merely rote and mindless learning. Naturally, we all know what a huge challenge this is because there are so many different kinds of learners with their own unique family background, personality and growing-up environment.

I can only pray that the examiners who had assessed my pupils during the GCE 'N' Level EL Oral Examination last month share my humble views. -_-

jOyZ blogged at 12:59 AM

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