On the eve of my second control de lectura or reading test for geography, I would like to share with you how shocking the first control was, and how a test like this would have never happened in the States. The articles we had to read were not very difficult to understand and revolved around fecundity in Chile. In the class, Geography of the Population, we study demographics, concepts such as birth rates, fecundity rates, population growth and composition, etc.
After reading the one-hundred-and-eighty pages of text required for this test, we each took a section of thirty or so pages and made study guides based off the key terms and ideas. “We” are the six gringas in the class of around sixty Chileans. Next, we met together and went over each section, studying for at least three hours. Altogether, the study guide came to twenty-six typed pages.
All in all, I felt pretty well-prepared, but still nervous as I walked into the room at 8:15 that morning, well, probably 8:25, as the professor is chronically late, and the door stays locked until he gets there. The next few minutes were slightly chaotic as we rearranged the rows to put more space between the desks. We even put desks on the small platform at the front of the room—amazing how the class grows on test days.
Once we had settled down, the professor handed out the one-page test. The first eight questions were fill-in-the-blank, easy right? Not so much when you can’t seem to make your answers concise enough to fit in the blank. Nonetheless, the questions weren’t totally unfamiliar, and I slogged through them.
“Qué significa: ES, CENTA, MJH, TGF, SUF, CEE, RIP”
“No… no way, he cannot be asking us random abbreviations,” I thought. “One-hundred-and-eighty pages of text, and I’m getting asked about abbreviations?”
These were seven of the eight multiple-choice questions that followed the fill-in-the-blanks. At this point, my normal test nervousness turned into panic as I laughed silently at the absurdity of these questions.
“Now is SUF subsidio unido familiar or subsidio unico familiar?”
Glowering, I waivered somewhere between wanting to ball the test up and bounce it off the professor’s head and wondering what an F would do to my average. Looking up, I made a face at one of my classmates, who looked slightly nauseous, and turned back to the dreaded abbreviations. After a few well-educated guesses as to whether CENTA meant Centro Nacional de Tecnologia Argicola o Centro Nacional de Tecnologia Agropecuaria, I moved on to the final section: true-or-false. This section consisted of random sentences lifted from the text.
“Yes!” I thought. “I remember reading this sentence. It has got to be true.”
Or not. One word of the sentence had been changed, therefore making it false. Needless to say, I didn’t do well, though I felt somewhat better when the majority of the class failed with me. The highest grade was a 4.7, which is more or less equivalent to a 77.
Now, in my experience, if something like this happens, the professor then realizes that he either didn’t teach the material well or that he didn’t give a sufficient explanation of what the test would cover. Instead the professor told us, with a completely straight face, that you know if there are eight true or false questions then four have to be true and four have to be false. That statement caused quite an uproar. If you tell me to read a text because you’re going to test me on it, I’m going to focus on main ideas and terms. I probably won’t pay much attention to the abbreviations; I mean, why would I waste my time memorizing that? Fortunately, the professor explained the next test, over our notes instead of readings, better; and it went slightly better, though the grades were far from good. I made sure that I had an even number of true and false answers on that one.
Tomorrow, at 8:15, I will be sitting in a desk close to the window on the fourth floor of the Ruben Castro building in Valparaíso, Chile, taking my second reading test for Geography that covers an 11-page text, plus 11 news articles.
I have memorized every single abbreviation, so much for the overall ideas.
June 8, 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment