Language Exam

Keywords: comprehension

I originally intended to write this article last Saturday (2022-11-05), but procrastination got the best of me.

While scrolling through my phone on Saturday, I came across a video. With just a glance at the title, I knew roughly what it was about.

The video was about a program that invited the author of a Chinese language comprehension passage. The author’s answers to the questions were not closely related to the standard answers, and the author also admitted that they didn’t think too much while writing the article.

If I had seen such videos and articles in earlier years, my thoughts would have been the same. If even the author didn’t have that intention, why should we follow the standard answers? Are the creators of the standard answers more capable of understanding than the author themselves?

As I grew older and gained a deeper understanding of society, I developed a new perspective.

Once an article is written by the author, it no longer belongs to the author. This doesn’t refer to copyright, but rather the interpretation. The author may have their own interpretation, but everyone else can also have their own interpretation.

So if everyone has their own interpretation, why is my interpretation not considered correct? Why are there standardized answers for exams?

Since I started to understand the purpose of Chinese education (not only Chinese education, but also education in many other countries), I began to understand a bit.

Language exams (in the field of humanities where there are no correct answers) not only test your understanding of the current passage, but also test your understanding of Chinese education, your understanding of the examiners, and your understanding of your own student career so far.

Why do I say that? First of all, the thoughts the author had while writing the article are unknown to the examiners. The examiners (usually several of them) try their best to understand and speculate on the emotions the author wants to convey (such as the use of various descriptions to express something).

At the same time, the examiners also need to modify their conclusions based on the educational environment of the country (such as Confucianism in China, Chinese family culture, patriotism, traditional filial piety, traditional Chinese festivals, hatred for wars, etc.) in order to better align with the mainstream or the thinking of the Chinese people who grew up in this culture.

This is probably where the standardized answers come from.

This explains that if you answer the questions according to the thoughts that are usually instilled in you, following the train of thought that can be loosely referred to as standardized answers, then you will basically match part of the answers provided by the examiners.

So who would write something that is basically the same as these standardized answers?

The first type is those who have been completely assimilated by this education system, thinking that answers should be like this, where good means truth, goodness, and beauty, and bad means falsehood, evil, and ugliness. These people see the world in black and white (at least at the moment).

The second type is those who have grasped the way this education system works, have a clear understanding, and treat exams as exams, trying to speculate the intentions of the examiners, thinking about what the examiners want to test you on, in order to write the answers that the examiners want to see and score high marks.

Who wouldn’t be able to write the standardized answers (or partly related but with different ideas)?

There are probably two categories of people.

The first type is those who have not been completely assimilated by the current education system (but have been partially assimilated), still have their own thinking, subjectively reject the various thoughts instilled by this education, but have not yet seen through the essence of this education. They want to express their true thoughts (or their interpretations, rather than considering how the examiners want you to answer), but ultimately fail to get high scores (although they do not intend to, they also want high scores).

The second type is those who have also seen the purpose of this education system but don’t care. They don’t care about expressing their true thoughts, don’t care about not scoring high marks, although this type is very rare because students generally like high scores.

Another type is those who have accepted this education system, but due to their weak learning abilities, they are unable to express the answers that the examiners want.

The last category is those who truly have no thoughts of their own, just drifting along within the framework of this education, neither accepting this education nor doing their own thinking, and going to school is torment for them.

This is just some reflection on certain things from my time in school, after leaving campus and entering society. Back then, I was restricted just because I was in the mountains.

In fact, a person’s life is not free at all, including thoughts (the environment of existence, the social system, and the education system impose certain limitations), and physical aspects (uneven medical standards, complete food safety chaos).

We can only try to break free from some of these restraints and limitations as much as possible in order to obtain a relative freedom. This kind of freedom can only satisfy the individual, because only we ourselves know what we don’t want to do and what kind of life we want to live.