Wednesday, February 21, 2007

English Proficiency Test

On the 10th of February, the Science and Mathematics teachers were required to sit for an English proficiency test. They were told that the test would consist of questions on basic grammar or vocabulary. They were in for surprise! The test was biased towards the science teachers because 70 percent of the questions tested the candidates on their knowledge in science. In the paper 2, only 6 marks out of 65 were allocated to questions on Mathematics. Now, I would say that the test was not valid. This is because if you are not teaching science, you can't answer the questions because you are not familiar with the scientific terms such as alveoli or oxy-homoglobin etc. The candidates who score below 50% have to go through a proficiency course which would concentrate on improving the teachers' grammatical skills. Then they have to be tested again. If there is no change on the components of the paper, these teachers will fail again and they have to go through another course. And these courses are not cheap, mind you!

Monday, February 19, 2007

Greetings

Hi!
I am new in the bloggers' community. Wishing everybody Happy Chinese New year.