Testing Woes

When students are in 11th grade they take a test that is very important. It is called the ENT test. There are four subjects on this test, each with only 30 questions. The test is worth 120 points total. Students who score below a 50 are not allowed to apply for college. Students who score above 110 are often offered scholarships.

Students only get one chance to take the test - no retakes! This means that 11th grade is a very stressful year.

My host teacher, Natalya, stated that some questions on the test seemed unfair. For example, in the English section, one of the multiple choice questions was, "How many rooms are in Buckingham Palace." Not only does this question not prove that someone can speak English, as most English speakers don't know the answer, but when Natalya looked on the official website for Buckingham Palace, the number of rooms listed was not given as a choice on the exam. She wrote a letter of complaint. They replied that the question was still valid because in the 9th grade English textbook, a number of rooms for Buckingham Palace had been given. This seemed unfair and stressed to me how much memorization students in Kazakhstan were expected to do.

I could relate to tests being unfair as a few years ago my students had a test focused on a listening passage called Lydia's Lasso. It was about a girl lassoing cattle. The student scores decided a large part of their promotional criteria and ranked me as a teacher. However, as New York City students, most of them had no idea what a lasso was nor had ever seen a cow in real life.

I guess that testing woes are somewhat universal!