End of Semester exams - Sem 1

Six down, two to go! One today, one tomorrow.

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On Friday I had Japanese reading, composition, and Japan politicoeconomics. Reading was easy, but that means I had to be extra careful not to lose marks on silly errors. The composition was fairly ok, but I won't be expecting a perfect score. The question was easy enough - pick any experience in Japan so far, and write a structured, coherent piece 600-800 characters in length in 70 minutes. The time pressure was very stressful for some people though. The girl sitting next to me in the exam was from the top class (class A). With 20 minutes left to go, she had only written 400 characters. One friend only managed to write 400 characters in total when time was up (incomplete composition). So it was definitely not an easy test.

The politicoeconomics test has been the worst by far. The reason why it was so bad wasn't primarily due to difficulty. The worst thing about this subject was the course structure, from week 1 to final exam. As someone aspiring to become a teacher, I have a lot of criticism about how this subject was run. It's obvious that all of us are still getting a grasp of Japanese, so we will struggle with language. But instead of going through and explaining possibly difficult concepts in the written material (which, goes without saying, should then be assessed), the teacher chose to use a mix of sparse Japanese and poor English to talk about topics largely unrelated to the written content. Having poor English wasn't the teacher's fault, but forcing us to computate unfamiliar content in near unintelligible English wasn't a very smart teaching method in my opinion.

Furthermore, this has been the only class so far where the learning objectives of the course haven't been clearly outlined. We found out which topics covered in class would come up in the exam, and still, we didn't know what the exam structure would be - will we be writing short response? Multiple choice? Calculations? We were all caught unawares when what we were assessed on was largely our ability to write kanji, our mathematical ability, and ability to memorise tables of figures. Firstly, fair enough that we should be expected to know the Japanese word for GDP and GNI (gross national income). Of course we touched upon them in class, but not once did he write out those kanji for us, or hint that it was of great importance. I studied them because I personally wanted to learn them, but I never expected a direct question asking "write the kanji for GDP". Also, this is not a subject testing our mathematic capability. However, I literally spent 3/4 of the one hour we had for the test trying to divide 28,980/58,460 to find the ageing index and figuring out which three foreign nationalities in Japan had the greatest increase between 1960 and 2010, using a table of 30 countries. Again, it would not have been so bad if we had been told beforehand of our expectations for this course. But I honestly had not idea we would be required to calculate figures on such a minute scale, and I have a feeling I wasn't alone. On top of all of that, there was even one question directly asking us to identify the four countries whose names had been removed from that table, by looking at their population growth from 1960-2010. China, Korea and Brazil were countries brought up in class, and they were reasonable to assess us on. But why Philippines…? As far as every member of our class is concerned, we did NOT talk about the population of Filipinos in Japan. I am VERY annoyed that not only did he never hint at our need to study the six (ridiculously) detailed tables we'd been handed out in the possibility we'd be asked to fill in one of them, but that he even chose a piece of detail that wasn't of prime importance.

Lastly, and most importantly, there was not one question testing our understanding of politicoeconomic concepts. It would have been nice to be asked to explain what GDP was comprised of, or even how the GDP of Japan has changed over the past 50 years, which were topics covered in class, but not even slightly required in the exam. In short, this exam didn't assess our grasp of the overall aims of this course at all, and for that reason, it was a poorly thought out test. After hearing the feedback from his students after the test, even our teacher had second thoughts on putting so many calculation based tests into an hour-long exam. I get the feeling he didn't try very hard in teaching us, for most of the semester, using my own experience of teaching children over the past nine years as reference.

Here ends my venting. Needless to say,  I will be writing all this in the feedback survey we will be receiving at the end of the exam period. It negatively affects the learning ability of everyone taking this course.

Between our first day of exams (last Friday) and the second, we had a long weekend - yay! It was called Marine day, and I have very little idea of its significance up until now. Maybe I'll do a bit of research later on. Anyway, it was a much needed long weekend, to study Japanese history. I'm not exaggerating when I say there was an obscene amount of content that had to be remembered. I think I learned to write the same amount of new kanji over the three-day long-weekend studying for history as I did for this whole semester of Japanese class combined. Not to mention, we had to learn the significance of these words as well (though that was much easier than learning the words themselves since they were all related). I must have spent 75% of my waking time over the long weekend (amongst eating, attending church, and not showering) studying for history, and 75% of that time learning kanji.

The other two tests, listening and grammar, were not too bad. Again hoping I didn't make silly mistakes, because I checked very carefully.

Today is the speaking test, which will involve receiving a topic, being given 30 seconds to think about what to say, and one minute to say it. We will receive two topics in total. Not much I can do in the way of preparation for that, so it gives me time to write this ^^

On Friday, we get all the results back. At no point in my Australian school education experience have I ever received back an end of semester exam result so quickly. Only in Japan.

So this post turned out a bit longer than I intended it to be ^^" Apologies again for ranting.