Some edu-crats now want to drop the oral component of foreign language exams because this kind of testing is (here it comes) "too stressful" for students.
What?
Look at this!
Oral tests could be dropped from language GCSEs because they are "too stressful", according to a report.
. . . Lord Dearing emphasised that any change should not weaken the "validity of the assessment". But he said: "That has to be balanced against the risk that a test that is often highly stressful and over a short period, whilst accurate in its awards against performance on the day, is not a reliable test of the candidates' capability."
The report was accepted by the then-Education Secretary Alan Johnson in March 2007. A sharp fall in students taking language GCSEs had prompted the review.
The drop came after the government ended compulsory modern languages up to the age of 16 in 2004.
This makes no sense to me at all: if you study a modern foreign language, you should be able to understand that language both in a written and in a spoken form. This kind of practical proficiency is the heart of any foreign language education. This seems obvious.
In fact, this is so obvious that it utterly escapes today's misty-minded edu-crats. To paraphrase Orwell, nothing is so stupid that academics won't believe it. And try to implement it.
About the "stress" issue. Give me a break!
Pretty soon, some edu-crat somewhere will propose cancelling all exams because exams are "stressful." Everybody will automatically receive top marks for everything...which means that nobody learns anything at all and that marks are meaningless in the morass of mediocrity and mass ignorance. Oh, but the bubble-headed idiots wandering will be free from exam-stress!
I'll let you ponder this: if you want exam stress, I'll GIVE you exam stress. Be happy you're not taking the medieval Chinese civil service administrative exams, you modern British educational milquetoasts. You should be ashamed of yourselves. The nation that birthed Cambridge and Oxford during the depths of the Middle Ages, that produced intellectual giants of all fields, is now pewling about a little exam stress.
Get over it. I've had plenty of "stressful" exams (foreign language and otherwise) in my life, and I'm still alive and kicking -- and better because of those exams.
And here's a final idea. LIFE ITSELF IS STRESSFUL. To be alive is to be faced daily with stress of all kinds. The only way you'll ever be totally free from stress is IF YOU ARE STONE COLD DEAD.
Of course, it seems that edu-elites are trying to achieve the closest version of death without actually extinguishing lives -- they're trying to extinguish brains. Brain-dead is next to real dead.
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