HSK Horrors

The last time HIT tried to hold the HSK, they were apparently so ill-prepared that the listening section sounded like a third-generation tape of a couple of people with confidence problems making an international call from the bottom of a well. While eating a packet of Jacob's crackers. Each.

Needless to say, even language savant Mingrui failed to score well. Embarassed, yet ever mindful of 'losing face', the school declined to tell Beijing, which might have led to some consideration for the student's poor listening scores. Outraged, a Korean student vehemently complained. HIT caved... to an extent. A refund for the students, but Beijing wouldn't be informed. The price of silence? A couple of hundred RMB each.

All this serves as preamble to saying that HIT no longer dares to hold the HSK exam for its own students. HIT students all have to go to rival Heilongjiang University (HLJU) for their HSK-taking needs.

The examination itself was held in a series of pristine recording rooms, each desk equipped with a headphone and microphone headset, and a tape recorder sunk unevenly into the grey plastic.

First up, Listening. The first passage began "第一到第八题". Eight questions on the trot? Something about crows picking up stones and disrupting trains. By the time it had finished, I was totally lost, and had forgotten the content at the start of the passage. An annoying girl in the row behind kept asking inane questions in a loud whisper. I don't care if you've got an HB pencil or a 2B! Shut up! I'm trying to think here!

Reading was about as tough as expected. One minute per question, involving fifteen written answers and twenty-five multiple choice. Guess... definitely this one... guess... guess and more guesses. A guy next to me, a Korean from the green of his passport, shook the table furiously as he wrote, erased and re-wrote questions furiously. Stop it!

A mixed bag in the comprehensive section. Find the mistake, multiple choice cloze, put the sentences in order, and finally cloze writing. The six weeks of weekend mornings given up to specially preparing this section had paid off. Overall, not too shabby!

We had a ten-minute break, which the predominantly Korean students spent milling around outside smoking, and telling each other how badly they'd done, each more humble than the next.

"You must have done much better than me, I'm a terrible student" and "How did you think it went? You had no problems, right?"

Exactly ten minutes later and we took our seats again. Essay time. A short passage about young people being increasingly under pressure. "How do you relieve pressure?" Easy! I drink, and sometimes I get angry and punch trees! I recalled Teacher Wang telling me that the examiners were also very concerned with moral fortitude - you can make contrarian arguments, but try and express opinions in line with traditional Chinese morality. Oh, and where possible, toe the party line. Hmm...

I scrubbed out my essay plan and scrawled something about exercise and setting realistic expectations. Then I rambled for what was easily 300 words about the increasingly unbalanced male-female ratio here, how this leads to the so-called 1-2-4 problem, and how great it is that the government is taking steps to alleviate the problem. Short on time, I slapped on a closing section about how I exercise if I'm feeling stressed, and concluded with a poorly-worded description of the Buddhist belief that desire leads to unhappiness. A good 450 words of poorly-connected but morally fortitudinous streams of consciousness. I felt pretty pleased with myself.

I was dreading the last section - Speaking. Firstly, two minutes of reading aloud a passage on the Olympics into a microphone. Then two three-minute questions on a related theme. "Describe a game you used to play growing up." and "What's more important in competition, taking part or the winning?" I tripped up a couple of times on the reading. Teacher Wang Shuangxi was right. I did sound terrible. Then, without a watch to mark three minutes, and too anxious to look up at the clock, I rambled on desperately until I truly had nothing left to add on each question in turn. I slipped off the headphones to hear a good half of my fellow examinees still talking. Not good.

We checked our tapes. Mine, and three other students', were still blank. A lucky break! We were taken next door to re-record our Speaking parts. Enxi scowled at me from the back. Not fair! I tried to incorporate what I'd overheard other students saying, and improve my reading aloud, but to no avail. The second performance was even worse than the first. With a heavy heart, I left the examination hall. How to relieve all this exam pressure? Exercise didn't seem too appealing right then. Getting angry and punching trees? Even less so.

I ditched the "moral fortitude", and found a Korean restaurant to hit the soju.