Exams

I just finished my last exam of midterm week. It's difficult for me to guess how I did on them. They weren't as difficult as I was expecting them to be, but I still know that I made alot of mistakes. The good thing, I suppose, is that I know what alot of them were, and I know what the answers should have been.

Granted, knowing my mistakes after the fact doesn't remove the damage to my final grade, but it does help my overall learning. I just hope the damage wasn't too great. These exams were 40% of my final grade. The other 60% comes from the final. I'm just happy that I'm in a level that still gives midterms. A couple of my friends in the higher levels take only one test at the end for their entire grade. That would have me nervous.

The first test was the one for my general language class, the one I have every day. I think that one was fairly straightforward. There were sections for choosing correct words for sentences, free responses with given grammar patterns, filling words in the blanks of a story, and writing dialogues based on a few paragraphs of information. I think there were a few more, too, but that test was on Wednesday and I can't remember anymore. The section that usually is the most difficult for me on homework was also the most difficult on the test. That section is the fill-in-the-blank story section. It wasn't bad in the states because we had a word bank for vocabulary. Here, however, we just had to know what should go there.

The second test was the listening test. The speaking speed on the tape was slower than what we're used to, so that made only getting one chance to listen to everything a little easier. There were sections for listening to single sentences, dialogues, a full paragraph, and several paragraphs. The answer sections had multiple choice, true/false, and free responses.

The third test was reading comprehension. It looked alot like the general class test, but with more huge blocks of text. This test had a special part, though, and by "special" I mean "horribly intimidating." Before the main part of the test, we had a 15-minute quick-reading. So given that amount of time, we had to read two different texts that were three or four paragraphs long each, and then answer questions about them. Some of the questions were free response. In preparing for the test, I thought about how long that would take me if I were just doing it for homework, and the answer was that it might take 40 minutes. So for the days before the test, I made myself tear through a bunch of readings. I think it helped.

The final test was my speaking test. This test had three sections. The first was reading a block of text out loud to our teacher. The second was answering questions about any text we had read for class up to that point. Finally, the third was free talking on a topic that we could select out of two listed on the paper we selected at the beginning of the test. I was fine and ready for the test in the five minutes I was given to prepare. However, when it came time to actually talk to my teacher, I got nervous and screwed up the fluidity in my speech to a large extent. She was probably expecting that, but I wanted to do better because I know I can.

We should be finding out the results of the test early next week.