Semester complete!

My first semester as a returning old bastard student at the University of Melbourne is now complete! It’s been awhile since the last update, mostly since it this was the whole exam period but also because I’ve kind of shifted to using Google Buzz rather than posting blogs. At least that way it’s not quite like talking to yourself. The main goal of this blog was to chronicle the process of going back to uni and studying Chinese so, semester complete, some updates would seem to be required!

What was required to complete the assessments varied considerably between subjects. Literature and Performance was a large essay worth half of the mark. This was pretty fun, a struggle at times to tie up a central point to match the topic I had chosen, but it was also a great learning exercise. Further close reading and analysis pretty much tipped my natural inclinations on their head and I came out with an opposite view than I went into it with. I was contrasting the role of childhood as seen in Romantic Movement poets and their literary inheritors. I actually put up Great Expectations and Jane Ayre to make the point. Proper slog this paper, lots of work!

Intercultural Effectiveness was rather easier in a sense, I merely had to subject a portfolio with commentary. It was stuff I follow anyway and I think I have a good grasp of the issue so it did’t take too long to do. Unfortunately I had a pretty horrendous experience with the prior assignment, a groupwork assignment, because only one of the other three students working on the project really had any inclination to help out. So I ended up writing 75% of it right at the point I was most rammed with Chinese stuff. We pulled a H2A for that, which meets my goal but it was a frustrating experience.

For my ‘IDF’ subject of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, I had a final bad ass 2 hour exam. This entailed writing two proper essays on set questions. Now I honestly can’t ever recall writing an essay by hand before. Having belatedly come to realise that I’m far better off preparing for the exam condition than actually swotting up on the knowledge, that’s what I did to prepare for this and wrote out some essays by hand. The shock for this exam was that it was held in some huge hall near the Melbourne Museum. There were over 5,000 students sitting some sort of exam all at the same time. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they do that. Why not run several sessions throughout the day so there’s not a massive pack of people? No idea. Anyway… it was alienating, stressful but I sat down and wrote two seriously bad ass essays. I expect a very good mark, and given the exam was 50% of the mark, this is a good thing.

Chinese, in what is clearly the theme of this blog, was the nightmare to end all nightmares. I put an astronomical amount of study into this and with good reason, the examination process was crazy. It consisted of a written composition test (1 hour), an oral presentation test (10 minutes), listening comprehension test (1 hour) and a final written exam (1 hour). I completely fluffed the written composition test, despite the fact I should have owned it. Nerves, annoyance at slow writing of hanzi… didn’t help. Herculean effort on the oral presentation and I think I did okay but the listening comprehension was an utter face of a test. I had ruthlessly drilled the listening material over and over again. I rock up to the exam and there’s this ridiculously easy and pointless pinyin annotation section, then on to the dictation. It was astronomically harder than anything we studied. It was unfamiliar, it was LONG. The paper was written badly, wasn’t clear at all times if it would be repeated or not but the greatest crime of all was that it was too damn soft. I sat at the front and I couldn’t make it out. The students looked completely shellshocked after, I was just resigned to another hopeless exam.

Fortunate then my final Chinese exam was the written exam. This is my strongest area by far. Again the examination procedure was draped in incompetence, the invigilators appeared to be 18 year old kids which were waiting for exam books to arrive, until someone pointed out the exam didn’t need any. Then as we’re kicking off some workmen start drilling into the wall. You can’t make this shit up. They could have maybe gone outside and told them not to, you know? Nope. Even the papers themselves were poorly photocopied and some of the characters were illegible.

None of this would make a difference. I’m good at this stuff. I had studied even bloody harder for this. In what was a common theme of the exams, two sections were ridiculously easy. The translation into English (okay, that’s my strength so maybe it was harder for others) and then a weird multiple choice section – which didn’t match up the “find the error” style we were told to expect (I had drilled HSK find the error tests for this). So thirds of the exam I would have got 100% on, there’s just no room to get it wrong.

The first third then was English to Chinese. This was actually pretty difficult. The sentences were more complicated than anything we’d  practised. I also detected few possibilities to use the specific grammatical patterns which were we had been learning all semester, realistically it was an excersize in how to translate complex sentences with clauses. This is, incidentally, nothing at all to do with anything the text book teachers, there’s no complex sentences in that at all. So yet another case of a badly targeted exam, wrong levels of difficulty, failing to actually test what we had been learning.

I wouldn’t have got 100% for that first third, it was actually quite difficult. That said I finished the exam nearly 15 minutes early so I looked at it a few times and scribbled corrections. I can think of one example where I probably put something in the wrong order though. Still, overall, they tried their hardest to provide a deeply crappy exam but this was home turf for me. I expect circa 90% at least for it. Unfortunately it’s ‘only’ 30% so it doesn’t really make up for the fluffs of prior exams. Although thinking about the listening exam, since the stupid pinyin section was a third of it and since all the rest was multiple choice… I’d have to think no less than 60% for that. So we’re at around 40% already, I did all the class work and homework stuff diligently with good scores, that’s another 10%, at least 80% for the oral, and, um, let’s call the written composition a total wash on 50%. In fact I’m pushing up to 70% territory, dare I hope for a H2B?

So it’s all over now. I should have aced the other three subjects anyway, so overall a high average. This ought to put me in a good place for the mid-year application. I’m very confident of that really. So now we begin the break and I take care of other stuff like beginning a new job doing web news for my old UK mag PC Retail (just called PCR now), that in itself was a real find. It’s not huge money but it’s sterling which goes further in Australia and should allow us to get by without being on the breadline.

Overall, a good experience. I enjoyed the subjects a lot even if Chinese was epic bad. If this was a full year I might have given thought to switching to Monash because I’ve heard some annedotal evidence of their Chinese program which I find encouraging, but they’re not doing mid-year entry and in any event I think I’ll have an easier time of it second semester at UniMelb because I’ve played the catch up and made the big mistakes.

I’m also developing a pretty strong sense of how screwed language acquisition is and have some ideas for helping to build stuff to make it better. I quite like the idea of turning a bitter experience into something positive.