Original Article: My University English Teacher
(2010-06-25 10:17:12)
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Original Article: My University English Teacher
It was In the 1980s. China.
My University English teacher Mr. W was a short old man. He always wore a pair of well-ironed pants. His shirts? Not necessarily so.
One thing he promised the class was that he would never fail any student, as long as we studies hard. Apparently this was from his own experience, when he was given 59.5 by his English professor for a course, and he had to stay on campus without a summer vacation to prepare for the makeup.
The English exam at the end of my second year was the last one for our engineering majors. Although all the course contents were mostly reading comprehension, the tests were based on comprehensive knowledge of English, including grammar, cloze test, reading comprehension and so on, in the format of English Proficiency Test. Although it was not a problem for me, it was too hard for most of the students.
The test was prepared by the Head of the English Department, and apparently without discussions with the teachers. Obviously Mr. W was not happy with it. While he was distributing the test papers, he was complaining “Isn’t it ridiculous to test students something they have not been taught?
After distributing the test papers, he made an announcement in the front. “I think that you guys are not familiar with the format of the test. Let me give you a couple of examples.”
“The answer to Q1 of Part I should be b); that to Q2, c); that to Q3 … He gave a few answers to the students for the 20 questions in Part I. The classes roared with laugher. He continued to tell a few answers to questions each in other parts of the exam.
Another teacher knocked the door and told him, “The duration of the test has been changed from three and a half hours to three hours.”
“Thanks you, I understood. The time has been changed to four hours instead of three and a half.” Another roar of laugher was from the class.
The final scores for the class were calculated by taking the square root of the raw scores, and times ten. Therefore, 36 became 60, and 100 was still 100.
My final score was 91. I did not benefit a lot from the score conversion, neither from his free answers.