In comparison to the bruising two week, heavyweight ordeal of the Leaving Certificate, the Center Tests are a lean, mean two day affair with the longest exams only running to 80 minutes.
And they are all multi-choice. So, unlike say the English 1 paper back home where you spend three hours furiously scribbling down every random thought you have ever had on the bog-soaked poetry of Patrick Kavanagh before your entire arm cramps into a sort of twisted claw reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, the Japanese tests are genteel exercises in mark filling.
Choose (a), (b), (c) or (d) and fill in the corresponding circle on the answer sheet.
Duration aside, it is this emphasis on discrete item learning as opposed to discursive answers on how you apply that knowledge, which is probably the greatest difference between here and home. I may not particularly care for Kavanagh's evocation of mildewed life amidst the misty drumlins of county Monaghan, but at least in the Leaving Certificate I may well be asked to justify that stance.
The Center Test, by contrast, will have a long piece on say, the Tale of the Genji and then present you with a question and four possible answers. The implication being that there is a single right answer to whatever is asked. And with just four answers provided, it is only through statistical probability that students' knowledge of the Genji can be imputed.
(As an aside, that reads kind of cool, doesn't it - 'knowledge of the Genji'. "According to the Center Test, wise are you in the way of the Genji. But, impetuous too, young Kenobi").
This is a very reductive way of both testing and ascribing value to knowledge. And it also leads to some peculiar forms of assessment. In the English exam for instance, in the first question, four words are given with the same letter(s) underlined in each. Students have to choose the word which has a different pronunciation for the underlined letter sound as compared to the other three words.
Now remember theyare in an exam situation so students can't actually vocalize the sounds. Instead they have to (a) either sound it out in their minds; (b) depend on their memory of the phonetic spelling of the words; or (c) curse this whackshit question and take a blind guess at the inane answer.
(For those of you who would like to take a shot at Japanese academic glory, the entire English paper is available here).
Oh my God, I hear you cry, but what sort of English education are those poor students getting in high school. To which the honest answer would have to be: "one that can be discrete-item tested on a nationwide university entrance exam".
The fact that pronunciation of the 'u' sound in 'amuse', 'cute', 'future' and 'rude' (to continue with the above example) depends on the speaker's identity, gender, social standing, the context in which the utterance is made, and, oh I don't know, the time of day perhaps, renders the question communicatively invalid.
It is, however, statistically valid and that is all that counts.
(The answer by the way is 'rude').
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