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The Test and What It Tests

The students here spend (or are supposed to spend) the time that they are not in class studying for TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language).  I asked a student and one of the Chinese English teachers whether they wouldn't learn more English if they used that time to study it in a different way. They could read a novel or watch movies and TV shows in depth (record every line, look up all the words they don't know, watch them until they memorized them). The student didn't have anything much to say. The teacher simply said, flatly (but he always speaks flatly) that it is more useful for them to study TOEFL, because they will go abroad in half a year.  Someone could make a satire out of it: students are more concerned to improve their English score than to improve their English.

"There's a correlation -- a rising tide lifts all boats."  If only the instrument were perfectly precise! And couldn't it just as well go the other way? You could spend more time in the rigorous study of English, and despite the fact that you had not prepared for it formally, your TOEFL score would improve of its own accord. That's why I never put a lot of time into studying standardized scores myself -- I thought appearance and reality would accord perfectly, so that as long as I was earnest in the relevant studies, the test would reflect my earnestness. There's some cynicism in preparing for exams: you assume that the appearance is somewhat independent of the reality, and you are concerned just as much to appear skilled as actually to be so.

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