Semantic error of measurement
Things are hectic as I still don't have a place to live, but besides the loathing facet of dealing with cramped quarters, long commutes, a propensity for the Japanese to be overly proprietous and superficial, recalcitrant about communicating, well, what more can I say?
I had a nice chat with M again. He seems to be doing wonderful things at the university as you intimated. Before he arrived, there were no speaking classes at all; now he has coordinated such a program. He's also figured out the most ethically clean way to fail 25% of the students--he pools all the test results for each of the oral classes, and sets the cut point appropriately. Very good of him--the down side is there are teachers who rebel because the course is teacher proof--he designs all the forms of assessment, and well, you now how teachers are about such control taken from them.
The rumour about the place still is that EVERY teacher must fail 25% of their class, regardless of true performance. So you may have a class of excellent students and still a quarter of them must fail. Just shows ignorance about matters of assessment and testing really. To wit, there is not one testing book in the school library, nor are there any in the downtown book shops that have a foreign language books (although there are plenty of TOEIC guides and coursebooks). Sheesh. At least M has identified the correct approach to setting a cut point, and I hope to work more closely with him on it--(yes, the phi(lambda) and SEM stuff here too!).
I talked with the university president's right hand man-mainly because he wanted to size me up, and he wanted my impression of TOEIC and all that. Well, being the honest person I try to be, I said it all depends on what they wanted the TOEIC to tell them--that is, test purpose should be borne in mind when choosing any sort of assessment instrument. I also cited the official TOIEC report from ETS that states that the majority of TOEIC test-takers are Japanese (over 70%), that they are also the lowest on average for that test, which means to say they are the 'worst' performers of English, and I queried why that might be the case. My bad. But I couldn't resist the challenge.
Generally speaking, most of the folks here are here for the money and not much else in terms of scholarship or research. It's an old boys club as you well now, and if you can swallow that fact, and abandon all the time and energy one spent on doing post-graduate studies, scholarly research and the like, get the full frontal lobotomy (or fall prey to sex and booze) one could stay here forever. Some do. One guy in his 60's, a Ph.D no less, sings country western songs in each of his MBA classes, guitar and all. It doesn't help that he's a disciple of Rush Limbagh either. The even higher-ups are incorrigible old, disgusting alcoholics and womanizers. Sheesh.
The others? Well, playboys and misfits of all shapes and sizes. There are a few earnest good people, but very few. If the intrigue of political jockeying in the corrupt university system, playing the game cleverly and buttering up those in power is one's cup of tea, then this is the perfect place to be.
As for me, well, I daydream about clean mountain water, fresh air and sunshine, coconut water and mangoes, and semantic measurement of error.
May all our deviations be standard.
Gaga | 5:13 PM
| comments
...............
...............
Comments:
Post a Comment