At the end of every semester comes a certain bitter sweet time of the year when teachers are busy grading and students are busy preparing for exam time. Today I wanted to give some quick thoughts on my experience in examining Chinese students over the past 8 years.

First this to mention, I know the students hate exam time but for foreign english teachers there is a duality to this time of year, on the one hand we don’t have to work as hard as we just need to prepare one exam and give it a couple hundred times, but on the other hand we have just one exam which is repeated a couple hundred times. Often for my final exam I will have my students give me a presentation on something they find interesting, strange or fun about Western Culture. I like this exam becuase it allows me to clearly see which students are actually paying attention and which are just coasting by on the bare minimum. What I’m going to do in this update is try and give you some tips on how to get a good mark in an English exam given by a foreigner.

The most important thing I can say is just to make it interesting! I can’t repeat this enough, though I do repeat it a lot in class. Whether it’s a presentation, an essay or just answering intereview style questions given by the teacher, make it interesting. As I said I have anywhere from 300-700 exams to go through (depending on the number of classes and class size) and if the presentation is the same as the past 250, I’m going to be very bored and a bored teacher does not gives unhappy marks. Some tips to making your presentation interesting.

a) Pick a topic others haven’t – I can’t tell you how many times I have been introduced to the NBA, Guys, I know you love the NBA, I know Kobe and Yao and all the rest, in my 8 years in China I have been introduced to the NBA hundreds of times. Please, either find something new or at least introduce different of fun things within the NBA.

b) Do not, under any circumstances, copy your work – Copying from another of my students is just stupid because I will notice if two presentations are the same. Copying from the internet is marginally less stupid I guess but it is very easy to know when students have copied from the internet, you may think you are clever and the teacher wont notice, but we do and your mark will almost always reflect that.

c) Do Not Read. I tell all my students, reading a peice of paper is fine but it’s not showing me you know how to speak English. Reading and Speaking different and reading is very easy in comparison. Take a little time before hand and just learn what you are talking about. Looking down at the paper to remind yourself where you are is fine but if I don’t see your eyes the entire time, your mark is going down.

d) Do something different – Last year I had one group who put on a skit with costumes, music and acting to show me differences in East VS West Weddings. They got high marks. I had another group which had created pictures by hand and other things to help show their topic better, high marks. I had one group of boys who did a rap about the NBA, high marks. If I tell you you can do anything you want, understand I really mean that, I want students to be creative and use English in ways that are fun, that’s how you enjoy learning a language.

e) Don’t be so factual – “Vancouver is 2,878.52 km2 in size”. Honestly, I don’t care. If you get caught up in the small details of the issue it slows down your talk and makes those listening grow board. If someone asks about you they don’t want to know what size shoes you wear and how much you weigh, they want to know what makes you interesting. If you are going to tell me about a person, skip what he ate for breakfast that day and instead tell me why I should care about that person.

f) Know your topic – Factual isn’t always bad if the facts are interesting of course, however, if you are going to tell me a fact, make sure it’s true. “Canada is South West of the USA and has 1.2 Billion people” (yes someone said this) is so incredibly false I don’t even understand how somone could say it. If you choose a topic, learn about it. And don’t just use one source, try to make sure what you are learning is factually correct. If something seems strange to me and I am not sure if it’s true I will write it down and check it later, if it’s not true your mark will reflect that.

g) Don’t be insulting – I had one friend who took an IELTS exam, during the test the examiner, who was American, asked her to tell him about something in the news recently she found interesting. It was not long after the second Iraq war started and she talked about how horrible it was and how the USA was a bad country and she did not like them. To an American. I had another student tell me that all Western food is bad for you and will make you fat. (insulting and very untrue) In English we are taught, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Take this idiom to heart during exam time.

h) Stay on time – I set time limits on each group for a reason, I need to finish hundreds of exams in a set period of time. If you go over, that means that I need to do more work during my free time and that is not going to make me happy. If I say 3 minutes each person, make it 3 minutes each person. If you are nervous and take more time because of that, I completely understand, but when a student talks normally for 10 minutes when I told them 3 minutes, that’s going to lower your mark because you didn’t listen to instructions.

i) Quality, not Quantity – Going along with the last post, If you want high marks from a foreigner, don’t worry about all the big long words you learned from all the books, stick to simple English and stick to words you know and can speak fluently. An exam is not the time to break out the word mellifluous which you learned last night. This goes for IELTS and TOEFL exams as well, if you spend a minute trying to remember how to pronounce a long word you look like you don’t know what you are doing, whereas if you stick to simple easy words, you may not look so professional but you will look like you know how to communicate in English which is what those exams are wanting to see. Big vocabularies are great and important for life, but during an exam, stick with the words you already know.

There are many more things one can do besides bribery to get a higher score in English exams but these are a few simple ideas to follow. I will try to make more posts about this in the future as well as some more focusing more intently on the IELTS and TOEFL exams as I know many of you are taking them.