The shambles that they called 'exams'

Exams over here are most decidedly not the stressful affair that they can be in Britain. To begin with, nobody ever really knows when they are! The final dates were announced far too close to the time for my liking and made planning our Christmas escape to Shanghai much more difficult, as we intended to leave as soon as they were over. Eventually we were given dates. First exam Monday 17th December, grammar. This was when we discovered just how ridiculous the exams are. The teacher had in fact told us exactly what new vocab would be in the test, which paragraphs we should learn, and so on. The test would have been easy anyway, but with the added extra help that we all already knew the content of the exam, it became pure routine. For us. Because we had been in the class. But the Kazakhs were finding it much more difficult, and had to resort to 'subtly' using dictionaries and their textbooks, shouting questions at each other across the room, and even using their mobile phones to text or phone over the answers and questions. Halfway through the exam, a man who we call Pangpang came in and started berating Rachel for not agreeing to come to a singing competition later that week. Then he made Tobin pose for a fake photograph of him happily doing the exam. I also noticed that the girl next to me was craning her neck throughout the entire exam to see my answers. I'd have been annoyed were it not for the fact that she was doing a different exam paper. The one a level above me, as it happens. You'd think my answers wouldn't reach that standard! When Liam got up to leave, the teacher checked through his exam paper and pointedly suggested that he check for errors again. He said he'd already checked, but she kept insisting. In the end Liam flatly refused and left. The same teacher had earlier STUNNED me by coming up, reading over my shoulder and saying "ooh look you should use this character here". I started to write the wrong one in and she shook her head and wrote it for me. In an EXAM. My God. And so we experienced our first Chinese exam.
The next one was speaking and listening. I was really worried about this exam actually, as these are by far my two worst skills, but I needn't have worried. They handed around oral exam topic options on slips of paper, but said that if we were unsatisfied we could simply swap for a better one. I ended up with 'tell me about your typical weekend in China and how it differs from your typical weekend in your home country.' Okay. I can do that! Nerves slightly got the better of me in the exam and I came out with a ridiculous phrase akin to: "On the weekend we like to go to Pakistani restaurant the Pakistani restaurant is our favourite restaurant we like to go there to eat we eat dinner there almost every weekend but in England I can't go out to eat because it is so expensive but in China it is not expensive at the Pakistani restaurant so we eat at the Pakistani restaurant, almost every weekend." Smooth. Oh yeah, and for that, she gave me 93%. Mad. This particular exam was held in a room which was filled with students, with Kazakhs playing music and so on, and we were just put at the back where it was slightly calmer. Tobin's exam was interrupted by a teacher coming over and having a chat with his examiner (our good old Teacher Zhang), during Peixiangfeng's, the examiner called over some random comments to his wife seated at the front of the room, and during Liam's, he was mid-sentence and she just got up and walked off. I looked over to see Liam sitting in stunned disbelief.
Listening came straight after, and was equally ridiculous. I couldn't hear because the people next to me were talking the whole way through. To be honest, if I knew the listening texts off by heart from our classes I could have done it purely on memory, but I had missed a lot of listening classes and so I couldn't fall back on that. My listening score actually pulled my total score down considerably, so I am really annoyed by that. I think for the summer exams I will learn the textbook! It's the only foolproof way of passing a listening exam in a room full of Kazakhs! At the end of the exam I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a girl sat with her own, unfilled-in paper in front of her, and three of her friends' papers surrounding it. She was comparing all their answers, finding the most popular answer and from that filling in her own paper. The examiner casually mentioned to her that she probably shouldn't be doing that, and then left her to it.
The next day we had our reading paper, which yet again constituted either being fantastic at Chinese, or knowing our reading textbook really well. I had flicked through the book and the advised list of vocab just that morning, so it was pretty fresh, and it took me no time at all to rip through the paper and get the hell outta there! It was in this exam that I finally saw a student just get up and walk over to his friend's table to compare answers. I had to hide my laughter with my head on the desk. Though if I had laughed out loud who would've cared? Liam and I regularly caught each other's eyes throughout all of the exams in incredulous hilarity. And so that was the shambles that was exams. I almost hope that they are the same in summer, for what better way to improve my average for Newcastle?