Cambridge student tries answering English questions on the Korean college entrance exam

[yohan94.livejournal.com]

1. [+1,597, -20] It's the reality of our English education. You study to death for the college entrance exam, study to death to pass your TOEIC... and then you get a job and sign up for introductory conversation classes.

2. [+1,245, -16] English education in our country isn't meant for practical use. It's just another subject to grade and divide you on.

3. [+1,022, -32] This makes no sense at all. What's even the point of Koreans studying as hard as they do now to get into colleges when the rest of the world doesn't acknowledge it? Cambridge is way more famous than Seoul University too.

4. [+46, -2] I expected it.... You can tell there's a huge difference in the way things are phrased between every day speech and test speech

5. [+41, -1] The hardest part is that you don't even know what's going on in the translated version because everything's so philosophical and there are too many comparisons

6. [+39, -4] Koreans just think any English word that sounds hard is classy sounding. I graduated college overseas and the only vocabulary you need to understand textbooks and all are the words you memorized in junior high school up to freshman year of high school. The rest of the stuff English on the college entrance exam was purely written to make sure that you get it wrong.

7. [+34, -2] People can study for TOEIC as hard as they can but their skills will still only be up to introductory level conversation when they get a job ㅎㅎㅎ

8. [+30, -0] It's because the test focuses on English not for practical use but as another test score... there are so many people with high TOEIC scores who can't say a lick of English. It's the reality of our English education system.

9. [+28, -1] So many foreigners have spoken out about how difficult the English on the Korean college entrance exams are. English speakers are saying it's hard and even Tyler put the system down. There are tons of Korean kids who've been learning English for 10 years and don't know how to speak it. Flawed education system.


source: nate via netizenbuzz, Ali Abbot

i did cambridge a levels (which were hard imo and had pretty specific questions and a crazy time limit), this was confusing at first, but after much concentrating and rereading i chose 5, 3 and 4. you can see the right answers at the end of the video.

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

That first one man... totally brutal. At least the second and third are only asking for the 1 sentence that sums up the rest of the paragraph. The first one is the same idea, but 10x harder because it throws in a mathematics metaphor out of nowhere and doesn't mention "effort" or "reward" in the answer choice, so you have to put the answer in context and then go back and reread the whole thing again...

The crazy thing is this wouldn't even be considered good academic writing in English, because you wouldn't get extra points for suddenly using idioms in your writing. Except maybe if you were a continental philosopher either 1) playing language games or 2) borrowing math-speak or science-speak to make your ideas sound more rigorous. This is more like what I imagine Korean academic writing is like, translated into English.

Anyway my answers were 3, 3, 2 (2 out of 3).

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Also the message behind the first question - zero effort, infinite reward = TEH BESTEST - is kind of subversive, isn't it?

[4minutesluts.livejournal.com]

depends if you believe in the singularity or not lol

[fallendreamers.livejournal.com]

I got them all correct so yay? but wow this makes no sense at all like no wonder most koreans are so bad at conversational English.

[jeliza]

I'm pretty sure the questions on the GRE were less confusing.

[mordres.livejournal.com]

+100000000

[ashiva.livejournal.com]

I got all three right and I'm not a native English speaker. Yay me. LOL I had to think a bit though at each question as the texts and some of the answer options were written in sort of confusing way and used awkward expressions.

[donutism.livejournal.com]

lol all this did was remind me of the terrible experience that is Cambridge A-level exams

[yohan94.livejournal.com]

same, which subject did you do?

[baeby-bloo-skys.livejournal.com]

reading these made me feel like i was taking the lsat all over again lmao
i'm fairly sure the grammar on number 7 is kind of strange? and the tone is not professional/academic at all. overall it seems as though whoever made the test really did just put in a lot of random words to trip people up and there's a bit of disconnect within the problems themselves where a new topic is suddenly introduced
i got them all right (yay me?), but that first one was confusing

[spainawards2008.livejournal.com]

They did feel way too wordy. That wasn't necessary other than to confuse people. It's hard to fill the gaps when it seems like a random sentence has just been removed. Very odd test.

[spainawards2008.livejournal.com]

I GOT THEM ALL RIGHT!!!
OMG I'm so unbelievably proud of myself! They took some thinking about though. I don't see what help this would be in testing someone's English fluency though since I image most English speakers would struggle with this. They are incredibly wordy questions with very high level language that probably won't ever come up unless you work in a highly specialised field.

[goshipgurl.livejournal.com]

OT but the girl in the video annoyed the heck outta me with her aegyo. god damn, when will (non-korean) people stop acting like that. its NOT CUTE

[rixythewraith.livejournal.com]

same

[hipployta.livejournal.com]

I thought she was cute LOL...more importantly I understood all her Korean and wish mine would flow so smoothly when I speak LOL

Those questions though...WTF? It's like they made the sentences as convoluted as possible for no reason. It is an extremely bad example of writing.

Where would you ever use writing or sentences like these? If I saw this come across for peer review I would chuck it.

[baekpedaling.livejournal.com]

I started watching some of her videos the other week and she makes me want to step up my learning game.

[unbroken-glass.livejournal.com]

reminded me of LNATs for sure, it's basically the exact same thing. Idk, i did a-levels in the UK and as a law student, I really don't find this hard at all after reading hundreds of pages of judgments in the exact same style of writing (i suspect judges all write 50 pages each on purpose tbh) But for my friends who can speak english as a second language fluently enough (and I have tons of friends in cambridge) would probably find it difficult so i can't imagine how Korean students are supposed to do this????? The stereotype is that cambridge students are all geniuses but of the 20+ people I know from Cambridge, tons of them have reaaaaally bad english and one girl who was so determined to go to cambridge for the prestige chose land economy as her degree cos there's 'less' competition lol.

[cettefemme90.livejournal.com]

Oh man, land economy. Like, I'm sure it's a worthwhile degree and that some people who take it have a great passion for the subject but everyone I met while there doing land economy did it for the same reason as the girl you know. Either that or ASNAC lol (I guess there may be some people out there who know at 17 that Celtic is what makes them get out of bed in the morning...)

In my experience of Cambridge, if you write in this kind of vague and rambly faux-academic manner, you'll be laughed at by your supervisor. And as a linguistics grad, I understood them all when I paused the video and took the time to read through them, but I maintain that they're written in bad English. The goal of communication is mutual understanding, not showing off all the words you know and deliberately confusing your reader. Admittedly some academic stuff reads like this though. Poor Korean kids. They don't need this.

Also, poor you having to trawl through dry law texts, at least linguistics stuff is pretty exciting for the most part. Do you enjoy the subject in general though?

[adlyeith.livejournal.com]

My ACT questions made more sense than this, the first one honestly made my brain hurt and I had to reread it several times and dissect it to understand it.

Most of my previous English teachers would probably weep if they read these lol.

[4minutesluts.livejournal.com]

im a native english speaker who regularly reads scientific journal articles and I had to go through that first one about 3 times to make sure that it wasn't just flat out grammatically incorrect, what an awful piece of writing. Reminds me of something Feynman wrote:

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I have this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”
So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

This also seems pretty telling about Korean education in general - it's seen as a way to rank people and say who's better at tests, rather than actually getting people to know things that are useful and benefiting society as a whole.

[suxaholic.livejournal.com]

amen

[missingmisnomer.livejournal.com]

mess

[bomsnose.livejournal.com]

i just gave up on the first one, though knew her answer wasn't right. rest i got correct, yay.
i think i have a special part in my brain reserved for these useless english tests, we just had to take so many of these in school that even when i didn't understand anything of the text, i knew which answer was the correct one, just cause of the way the options were formulated...

[sundaetea.livejournal.com]

those questions were so wordy, esp #1

[yohan94.livejournal.com]

it's funny comparing this to the english final exam here in finland bc they give you 6 hours (i don't even want to imagine the time limit they given for the questions above) and it's pretty simple and straight forward reading comprehension w multiple choice, one 500 word essay i'd say anyone could easily pass it

[hyeena.livejournal.com]

The final exams in Finland are slowly becoming computerized so I wonder if they'll keep the six hour time limit

[seul-gi.livejournal.com]

this looks like a levels all over again tbh, the questions are worded exactly the same as polotics/sociology papers

[tree-star123.livejournal.com]

these passages look like some of the mcat passages I did for practice. The first one looks like the old philosophy paper -_-

[juhli.livejournal.com]

cool, i got them all right! i think the girl would have gotten them all right if this was a real exam and she were concentrating. her answers were pretty hasty.
as convoluted the text is, the answers are pretty straight forward in the sense that you only need to understand the sentence before and after the missing part to get it right.

[lettace.livejournal.com]

who ever made this test threw in every word he could find from a thesaurus
that being said, these "korean style" english tests are so sad -- they ultimately grade you and don't really teach anything

[mikilove13.livejournal.com]

I got them right, but it really is weirdly worded. It took a bit though, those questions are wordy and the answers are also kind of odd.

[gingasaur.livejournal.com]

how is there a right answer to any of these? it seems like something you would answer with your own personal feelings. yikes is all i gotta say.

[haixiao.livejournal.com]

i remember one of my old korean language exchange partners was showing me his study materials for his english exams and i was like what the fuck, literally NO ONE uses these words in everyday regular speech and i didn't even read shit like this in my college classes. he also said that people try to memorize like 100 (super complicated, uncommon, and just flatout ridiculous imo) words per day before exams.

[kaninasan.livejournal.com]

I only read the first one and got it right, but wtf at that question. I mean as someone who speaks English as a second language, but did my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English I NEVER encountered anything like that. And it's very, very different to the English curriculum in my country, which is geared at preparing students for studying in English in uni. No wonder Korean's are so (seemingly) bad at English.

Standardized tests are ridiculous anyway, they don't actually test someone's knowledge, they just test how good they are at preparing for that specific test. When I did the TOEFL and GRE I was told I had to prepare for those specifically bc if I didn't I would probably get a bad grade, even though my skills were excellent. It's so dumb and serves no purpose.

[cettefemme90.livejournal.com]

Where are you from if you don't mind me asking? I'm always interested in looking at the various curricula for EFL because it's so wildly disparate and produces such different results in speakers. The ones that focus on communication over rote learning and crazy tests are usually a hell of a lot more successful in producing capable speakers.