Letters from Abroad

Testing a new exam

Recently we had a kind of a mock exam. More exactly, we were used as guinea-pigs in testing a new version of the English Proficiency exam. We were working for ‘education, education and education once again’. Our teachers at the courses say that the Proficiency exam is now becoming harder each year, because it is quite an old-fashioned exam and the government (which hates everything old-fashioned because these Labour are New) is updating it. As a result it is to become much closer to the Advanced exam, but much harder. The version tested on us was, according to our teachers, far harder than the present one. I hope they are right.

In this new version they have added several new exercises, although the exam still consists of an Interview, and sections on Reading, Listening, English in Use, and Writing. The worst of the innovations is a new task of English in Use. They give you two texts and ask several questions about each so that you don’t really understand which text is meant and what you are supposed to do. They expect quite long answers, but the questions are quite unclear. For example, a text tells about some medical research, and the question is: ‘Why does the author mention that the results of the research were published not only in medical journals but also in mass media?’. I don’t know whether any of my answers to this part have been correct (while the share of right answers in the whole English in Use section is quite large).

Well, Listening is quite hard, too. It consists not only of short statements or dialogues, like in TOEFL, but also of quite long texts, for example a part of a radio-programme. Multiple choice is rarely used. Sometimes they do the following: they give you a list of statements and you must write whether each of them is true or false according to the text just heard. It is not very hard, because you have a choice of only two possibilities; but you should actually understand every word of the text. If you just make out what they are speaking about, it won’t help you at all.

Cheers!

Hard