Curiouser and curiouser: Midterms

Having just posted about the evils of standardized testing, I now confess that last week I gave my students a Teach For China standardized midterm test. This isn't absolutely required, but a final is (we have to submit standardized testing data to Teach For China) so I thought it would be good to give my students practice taking an English test. I even gave them a little extra practice by giving them a quiz that replicated or mimicked some questions on the midterm.

I'm glad I did because it was clearly different for them than the Chinese tests they've had to take. For the "check the picture that corresponds to the word spoken by the teacher" section I had several students check both pictures. One of the multiple choice section involved blanks; students were supposed to choose the answer that could go in the blank. But almost every student asked me what the blanks were for.

The midterm was three pages. Actually it was two mandatory pages and a third "optional extension" (from Teach For China). In the first class I gave them the last page only when they had finished the first two, but everyone except one student had plenty of time. So after that I gave three pages to everyone, but only counted the first two pages in the scores. This meant stapling 210 three-page midterms. Not only does the copier here not staple, it also doesn't collate. Needless to say, simply stapling them took a long time. Grading, of course, took even longer.

Grading was simultaneously encouraging and discouraging. One student got 100%, several students only got scores in the 30s. The overall average was 67% with 65% of students passing. It was a hard test and their first English test, so this was actually better than I expected. But it certainly leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Now, the question is what do I do differently? What do I change about my teaching? How can I better engage and motivate the low performing students? Are there additional things I should be doing for my high performing students? I would love to be able to teach give them individualized assignments, but that's honestly not feasible. I have 200 students, I don't know all their names, and I don't have seating charts (they keep having their seats changed, anyway).

On a brighter note, I told them that when they finished they could draw on the back of their tests. They were pretty excited about being able to draw whatever they wanted, many of them had to double check "so I can draw anything?" Here are some samples.

This looks like a teacher, but I'm not sure if it's supposed to be me...I certainly had to shush them a lot.

This one wins the prize for sweetest. It says "I love you English teacher!"

I'm not exactly sure what's going on here...

This one is the most upsetting: a Japanese fighter plane gunning down a Chinese plane. There is a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment in this area from the WWII era.

"Small House, Really Beautiful"

Although simpler than some this one caught my eye because it was different from the rest.

Prize: relevance. This depicts our class taking its test and me walking around the room! I tried my best to prevent
cheating and encouraged them to cover their own papers, but it's really hard with 52 students squished into a small classroom.