Multiple choice

Hurrah for multiple choice examinations - the saviour of lazy students the world over.

Chinese people often talk about 'being lucky' in life. If you are a lucky person then you'll go far. If bad things happen to you, or you are generally unsuccessful, then maybe you are simply just unlucky. Having a scientific background, I didn't consider the topic any further, since its just superstition, right?

I've recently had the misfortune of looking at some exam papers that were given to Chinese students as a means of deciding whether or not they can graduate with a degree in English. Many of the questions involved selecting a correct answer from a choice of four. Sound familiar? Fairly straightforward, you might think. But what if there is no correct answer? What if there is more than one correct answer? Unfortunately I spotted several questions like this - oh dear.

I asked a Chinese person about this. She told me that all the answers to the questions can be found in the coursebook. Study the book, answer the questions - simple. (In China, 'studying' often means 'memorising' a textbook, word for word.) As it turned out, the answers to the questions could indeed be found in the book. But, sadly, the coursebook also contained mistakes. It seems that sometimes the way to pass exams here is to memorise the correct wrong answers.

Some were wrong in an entirely different way... One question even read: 'In which year was the textbook published?' How, precisely, is that going to test a person's knowledge of a foreign language? If you consider that it only takes a single mark to determine if a borderline student is going to pass or fail... A double thumbs-aloft to whoever decided to put that on the exam.

I turned to the front of the book to find the authors' names. Chinese. 'Isn't it at least edited by a native English user?' I asked. Apparently not. The books are full of outdated words and phrases, the likes of which would puzzle most English-speaking people (though not if you were about 120 years old), and are in dire need of modernisation.

One of my personal favourites involved an excerpt from a story, followed by some multiple choice questions. The final question read: 'In your opinion, what happened next in the story?', followed by four possible answers...

Does answer C imply answer D? (Actually, that's a whole different topic, more on that another time...) Does answer B imply that time will come to a standstill? And what about secret option E, which is what actually might have been in the examinees' imaginations?