Buckland Weekly #5 : Exams

A couple of reasons that most of our students love having a foreign teacher are that we don't usually set homework and our courses don't usually have exams. Note, however, the word “usually”. It is possible that you school will want you to set homework or conduct exams. I can't really comment on homework as every school I have been at has told me specifically not to give any. I set some when I first got here and was told not to do it again and since then I've made a point of discussing it at each school and always been told not to. I have heard of other teachers setting homework but it hasn't happened to me and it is very much the exception rather than the rule.

Exams are a different matter.

All my previous schools didn't want me to do exams, requiring just a single paragraph report on each class at the end of the year. The school I'm at now is different. They insist on oral exams for the students and I confess that at first it had me scratching my head.

I used to be an English teacher in England and our oral exams there were one to one with each student getting from ten to twenty minutes. They were recorded and then graded by someone else. It was all fairly professional. A little mathematics will tell you that if you give ten minutes to each student and you have 80 students in your class the exam will take 800 minutes. Given that a lesson is 40 minutes long that's twenty weeks just for exams. This is obviously not possible. Even if you give only one minute to each student and can somehow manage to organise it so that zero time is lost between students it's still two weeks. And it can sometimes take far more than a minute to coax a single word out of the shyer students.

I asked around and took advice and ended up with a way of doing oral exams that while, in my opinion, still far from satisfactory is, at least, doable.

Here then is my method.

First of all it's imperative that you allocate two weeks. It simply can't be done in one week. If the school tries to insist that it's one week you'll have to stand your ground. Explain why it can't be done in one week. Enlist the help of teachers in your department. Do whatever it takes but make sure that you get two weeks.

Having done that, this is how I proceeded.

I had a Chinese teacher translate some written instructions into Chinese and print up a lot of copies. These I placed on the students desks before the lesson began. They said, in Chinese,

"Today is an exam.

The teacher will call four students at a time to the front.

He will ask you each some questions.

Answer the questions using the best English that you can.

Tell the teacher if you do not understand his question.

If it is not your turn, you must remain quiet.

You can read, revise or do your homework."

When I had checked that they all understood I called them, as promised, to the front in groups of four.

I had about a dozen pictures of people in different situations - for example a boy surrounded by the things he used in his hobbies; a grandmother, mother and daughter baking cookies; a man and a woman looking at a map because they were lost; a teacher helping a student.

I showed the group one of the pictures.

I asked each student in turn these questions, "What is it? What can you see?" 

I asked a couple of follow up questions, prompting with partial answers where needed.

So, for example, with the boy surrounded by his hobbies I pointed at different items and asked what the boy liked to do.

When I had answers to some questions I put the pictures down and asked each student about his or her hobbies.

And that, because of time, was the end for that group.

I had each student write his or her name on a list with numbers and on a separate list of the numbers only I graded A-E. I did it this way so that the next group couldn't easily identify their classmates results. (I actually wrote //,/,-.\,\\ rather than A-E, to make it more difficult.)

A meant that they had given extra information that I hadn't asked for. 

B meant that they had answered the questions with mostly correct information. 

C meant they had answered the questions but with mistakes, 

D meant that they had had difficulty in answering and 

E meant they had been unable to answer anything.

Each group took about five minutes.

Now you, like me, may think this isn't really providing any meaningful data to the school and they also may be unhappy if you don't hand out enough higher grades. They may even insist on you bumping everyone up a grade .

I have to do it all again in a few weeks and this time plan to vary it by using a set of topic cards rather than pictures. I haven't thought it out completely yet but I'm thinking that the cards could be HOME, HOBBIES, ANIMALS, FOOD, FAMILY, SPORT and maybe a few more. Apart from that the organisation will be essentially the same.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'd welcome them, but if you are asked to do exams for large classes this at least seems practical if not especially useful.