I'm the least likely critic of tests and testing since my history degree was described as 'The Great Degree Robbery' by close friends at the time and reduced a super-diligent and committed member of my special subject tutorial group to tears when he found out he had got the same degree as me (yeah, he 'flunked' his predicted First and I snuck through with a 'Desmond' [2:2]but he couldn't speak to me when he saw me and previously we'd been on fairly good terms).

I went into my finals, thirteen three hour exams upon which the whole of my three year degree rested, armed with the ability to write only thirty-nine coherent answers to questions I had predicted would come up.  The room for error was very slim. In fact I swear I would have got a 2:1 if the Renaissance and Reformation professor hadn't skillfully and maliciously managed to combine every subject in his course with every other in every single question of the ten on his paper. I had to answer three of them (as on every single paper).  It was probably the greatest work of fiction I have ever written and when I saw the document at the end of this blog section on Scribd it made me think of tests and testing and my degree finals..

So I scraped a degree despite doing virtually no work until the exams and then spotting questions.  There were people who had read every book and worked hard for three years who got the same as me.  The reason I 'stole' my degree was that I was good at spotting questions, preparing answers and staying cool under pressure in the exam room.  In fact there was a regular routine when I entered the exam room.  I would turn the paper over and scan the 10 or more questions on it and tick off the ones I knew I could answer. I only knew three answers and had to write three essays. There was always stuff on there I'd never heard of. It was always a very sweaty couple of minutes because there was a chance that the examiner had combined a couple of things and screwed your pre-prepared answer. The skill in spotting was to work out which questions never got meddled with in this way. So after two minutes and three ticks on the paper I would sit back, sigh a big sigh of relief and then think, 'shit, I've got to spend three hours writing this lot out now'. At which point I always craved for some kind of neural tube to exist and be plumbed into the history department stats bank that would suck out the answers from my head when I plugged it into my ear. That would have been much quicker and simpler.  Who knows, maybe some day that's what will happen.  Over in a jiffy, 'sorry you failed, go and stand in the queue for the factory'.

Many people ask me if we can put tests on our site or create some for our EOT lesson plans/levels. It always makes me feel frustrated. To me the 'test' of learning a language is speaking it, i.e. being understood and then understanding the reply. To capture that and use it for the purpose we know as testing or assessment, why don't we just record our conversations. That's what learners do with our materials online. They study some language and then practice it with people. The audio file (.wav or .mp3) can be emailed to anyone for 'assessment', their teacher, their parents, their friends.

Exams = big money. Globally people spend a fortune on passing tests that themselves are designed in minute detail by highly qualified people. They are ways of sorting us out...fail....pay again...fail....pay again....fail...pay again...pass....giving us rank and position in society (and not a little self-esteem).

I think I insulted an expert in ELT pedagogy the other day. She emailed me because her boss, a publisher, told her to check out what we do and see if it was compatible with what they did as he was offering to sell it for us.  She emailed via a well-known online social network and her opening gambit was 'we seem to be in similar fields', my response, since she signed her message with her name and '..PhD' was to reply 'yes, but you have a lot more letters after your name'.  I never heard from her again.  I do hope she gets in touch. People seem to be touchy about their qualifications, which are the result of testing and 'sorting' us. Maybe I'm not worthy of a response from her?

I know it is different in some countries where you have to produce the original certificates and such like, but one of my brother's highly successful friends got a 2:2 at university. He put on his CV that he had a 2:1. No one ever asked to see the certificate as he looked and sounded very '2:1'. It is probably still there, he might even believe it by now.

So, test results, degrees and CVs which contain our 'sorted' details and give many of us and our 'betters' an idea of our 'worth' in society are fundamentally flawed as tools of deduction. That's why I love these exam entries that someone posted online. The answers to the questions posed in the exams are much more interesting, funny and clever than anything that would have got full marks and I'm delighted to say in a couple of cases the examiner acknowledges that, which says a lot about the human spirit and ultimately, the importance of tests (and I was going to write a caveat re: important shit like needing to know your surgeon is qualified, but there are thousands of fake doctors out there...not being discovered, and doing a perfectly good job).

Enjoy...