Testing time

According to one of my students in her end of term assignment, "Traditional British-style wedding, the bride, symbol of good luck will be the Calla, if new comers living in the suburbs and the ceremony will have guests step by the church, and sprinkled Changeup way".

As their end of term test I'd asked them to write a short essay about any aspect of British culture but ended up with an amazing insight into Chinese culture instead.

Many students, like the one I've quoted, took various shortcuts to get their submissions done. I assume the gobblydegook is the result of feeding some Chinese text into an electronic translator. This would also explain another one of my students telling me that "the males are all agnatic kin" (his English is okay but even I had to look up "agnatic"). Or, in an essay about London, I was baffled by the words "Telefajia" and "Ximinsi"? Turns out they're literal, syllable by syllable transliterations of Trafalgar (Square) and Westminster (Abbey).

Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong in using electronic dictionaries (I'm getting a Chinese one for myself soon). But what got me was the complete failure to check what they'd done. Reading what seemed to be a quite well written piece about marriage, one essay then went like this: "Your wedding dress: the complete guide" before giving me the dates and venue details of the "Chinese International Wedding Attire Exhibition" copied and pasted pell mell along with the rest of the article.

Essays were littered with dead hyperlinks or phrases like "click here for more". Worst of all there was the passage, painstakingly handwritten:

Request further info. Enjoy England will be pleased to send you a selection of our brochures; simply complete the form and tick the brochures you would like to order. Scroll down to view our current brochures. Why not register with Enjoy England and save...

What gets me is that there's no effort to disguise the fact that they've just copied stuff word for word; there's no sense of them trying to pull the wool over my eyes here. They think that just copying blindly is what's expected.

(Well, there was one instance of wool pulling. One student sent me her 300 word essay as an email which began "Remember Al Martino?" and went on to discuss some pretty obscure UK Christmas Number Ones with amazing familiarity. A quick Google search found a page from the BBC 'Learn English' site copied word for word except for introducing - inexplicably - countless spelling errors. She then had the temerity to write at the bottom "I really like music. That's why I write about it.")

When I gave out some pretty low marks there was consternation. I was emailed and texted with tearful messages asking why they'd 'failed' the exam. "Failed"? Nobody had bothered telling me there was a pass/fail threshold. Having said that, I had used my common sense in doing the marks and hadn't been too draconian anyway, giving marks in the range of about 40-85. But it appears that in China sub-60 scores are 'fails'. Worse than that, the 'fail' mark goes onto the Student Record - a document that stays with them for ever influencing not only their future education but their employment prospects too.

Were these kids' entire futures being blighted by this single mark from a patently incompetent English teacher? I called my boss to try and get the marks reviewed but he was inflexible: "I have sent the final score to the adminstration office and they have filed it". Great, thanks for your help.

So now I'm getting ready for the new term and classes full of sulking (if not suicidal) and resentful students. On the advice of another Chinese teacher - who had a word on my behalf to the President no less - I'm hoping to organise some kind of notional re-test to put things right and bump the scores up to the minimum 60. It seems that even teachers have to cheat sometimes.