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Scholarship and education
The habits of highly effective test-takersPosted by Joel Martinsen, June 7, 2008 6:11 PM
The composition section of this year's college entrance exam was held this morning. Though the exam's contents were embargoed while the test was in session (under the state secrets law), the questions surfaced on the web and in the evening papers this afternoon. In Beijing, where 118,000 students sat for the exam, the essay topic was an old self-help chestnut made popular by motivational author Stephen Covey. Here's the Beijing gaokao version of the "big rocks first" approach to time management, as reported by the Mirror:
Students were instructed to write at least 800 characters using this text as a starting point. The choice of text surprised many people, who had guessed that this year's topic would be related to the recent earthquake in Sichuan (though the earthquake did appear in the national exam paper I; see below). Instead, it was a familiar story that has even appeared as a sample question in test preparation materials, the Beijing Evening News reported. Big-name writers invited by the evening Mirror to discuss the exam question differed widely in how they saw the question's difficulty. Mai Jia (Ansuan) thought it was an awful question:
Zhou Ruchang, the noted Redologist, had precisely the opposite reaction.
Historical novelist Eryuehe agreed with Zhou, while Zhang Kangkang came down on Mai Jia's side. In other regions:
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There are currently 5 Comments for The habits of highly effective test-takers.
Comments on The habits of highly effective test-takersLong time ago, when I sat for the College Entrance Exam, you only needed to memorize many exemplary essays to perform well on the exam. Too bad thing! Students should be encouraged to speak up their own minds truthfully. Diverse perspectives should be fostered rather than suppressed. [Removed extra homepage link. --JM] And hopefully, they all will do well and go to a name school in preparation for leaving China to study overseas and never to return--the dream of every patriotic parent. What the hell do these exams actually test? Composition? They look like those rather boring mock-philosophical 'exemplary' articles you see in the Chinese newspapers on 'hope' or somesuch. I wonder how many people who would have made good science, maths or engineering students will be tripped up by the challenge of having to compose a meaningful essay on such whimsical topics. Once again I'm glad that I was tested on the A-level system, where you only had to answer exams in three subjects of your own choosing. Gaokao was such a traumatising phase of my life. Even 9 years later,it still comes back from time to time to haunt me in the form of nightmares. The sense of my whole life hanging on a thread (the exam) was so nerve-racking. The composition section of the Yuwen (Language and Literture) subject was stupid back then and stupid now. I am sorry which subject is this? Chinese? English? |
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