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Fukushima recently held its entrance exam for public prefectural high schools, and obviously all of the candidates were trying to answer the questions correctly. That’s usually a lot harder to do, though, when the question itself isn’t correct.
Last Thursday, the Fukushima Prefectural board of Education put out a statement to explain that a misprint in the instructions for a question in the social studies section had been brought to their attention. After confirming that they had in fact goofed up, the board has decided to give all candidates credit for answering the question correctly, regardless of how they actually answered it on the test.
That seems like a fair thing to do. After all, if the question is worded in a way that’s confusing or misleading, you can’t really expect kids to still get the right answer, can you?
Well, maybe you can. The question involved a section from Japan’s constitution, with one section underlined. Students were supposed to look at the underlined section, then write the specialized political term that applies to the underlined portion. The question even gave them a bit of a hint, specifying that the term is made up of two kanji characters.
Written in Japanese correctly, “Please write the applicable two-kanji word” looks like this:
The question students actually saw written in their tests, though, looked like this:
See the difference?
Two hiragana characters have had their order switched. Taken as a set, あてはまる, read atehamaru, means “applicable” or “appropriate.”
On the other hand, what was actually written in the test, あてまはる, atemaharu, doesn’t have any meaning at all.
Here’s the thing, though. Atehamaru is a phrase that shows up in tests all the time, pretty much in any permutation of “Select the appropriate answer.” It’s a word that students know they’re going to see over and over during their entrance exam before the test even starts, and because atemaharu isn’t a word, it should have been pretty obvious not only that the atemaharu was a typo, but also that it was supposed to be atehamaru.
Because of that, most Japanese Twitter reactions have been sort of shocked that everyone is getting credit for the question because of the atehamaru/atemaharu slip-up, with comments such as:
“Everyone gets a free point on the test just for that?”
“Makes no sense at all.”
“There’s lucky, and then there’s too lucky.”
“They’re being way too soft on them.”
“I honestly wouldn’t have even noticed the typo.”
“I think it took me 50,000 tries to read it as anything other than atehamaru.”
A few commenters also wondered about the possibility of that free point boosting the score of a student who answered the question incorrectly just high enough to secure admission to a school’s last available seat by nature of compensation for the typo, perhaps denying the slot to someone who had answered the question correctly and thus won’t be seeing their own score raise any higher because of the board’s decision. That would, though, mean that the two students had had equal scores before the free point though, so it would have been an incredibly small margin between the two applicants.
In any case, it’s probably safe to say that the board will be adding an extra round of proofreading checks to its test next year.
Sources: Fukushima Prefectural Board of Education, Yomiuri Shimbun via Livedoor News via Jin, Twitter/@livedoornews
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© SoraNews24
14 Comments
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Asiaman7
And in the U.S., applicants apparently receive “free points” based on race and ethnicity.
Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html
Laguna
I make many university tests. It's hard to keep them mistake-free.
maxjapank
It's the same for private high school entrance tests. You make a correction. Then the teacher in charge must retype that correction. Then it is sent to a business that creates the booklets for the test, and as their software is different, they must also retype the correction. Things get retyped incorrectly along the way.
By the way, many readers may not know this, but high school entrance tests for English may not use a word that doesn't appear in a junior high school textbook. What makes this difficult is that when a prefecture uses multiple junior high textbooks, the amount of words available becomes even less. For example, several books uses the word "culture", but one of the textbooks doesn't use it. So that means you cannot use the word "culture" unless you provide a Japanese translation at the bottom. It also means that word cannot be part of the answer.
smithinjapan
These tests are stupid to begin with and in little-to-no way measure what's appropriate for the students to succeed in school and life (well, in life, maybe... in school the tests reflect the still rote-based learning they think Japan needs), but when I saw the mistake I thought it was even stupider still to give everyone a point. It's clear what was meant, and since the typo makes no sense whatsoever, I fail to see why they should all get the point automatically. If it had said, for example, "a three-Kanji word" instead of "two-Kanji", or "don't write" instead of "write", then I think they should certainly all get the point.
Sven Asai
They get the exam bonus point because of their location, not the typo. Isn’t that obvious?
kohakuebisu
This happened to my daughter last year for a senior high entrance exam at one of the nationally run Kosen technical colleges. The mistakes related to one section of the English paper and rather than just the affected questions, they decided to award full marks to everyone for the entire section, about 30% of the total score. My daughter had hoped to score comparatively well on the English test, which counted for double marks compared to social sciences and kokugo, and so lost that opportunity.
She eventually got in via the second round of entrance exams, so no harm was done.
ThonTaddeo
I noticed that the number 2 was written with a double-byte character before I saw the "atemaharu" typo!
nandakandamanda
Usually they all get their answer to this question marked as 'correct' rather than just a single point being awarded.
Lindsay
Entrance exams for public high school. This is just one of many things wrong with the Japanese public school education system.
Mark
This test is OBSELETE , Japan needs to eliminate this discriminatory and allow students top advance into high schools without crippling them.
Mark
This test is OBSELETE , Japan needs to eliminate this discriminatory test and allow students top advance into high schools without crippling them. Many kids get completely turned off when they don't make it and the are psychologically devastated thinking that they are not good enough, or not smart enough, or something is wrong with them when they are COMPLETELY NORMAL just unlucky
Express sister
Fingers crossed the spelling of "obsolete" isn't on the test.
kaimycahl
@Asiaman this article is about scores in Japan it has NOTHING to do with scores in the US and one's race. I bet your I.Q. is a -1. Don't believe the race theory that these racist idiots put out. Anyone can learn it just depends on their environment, some individuals out perform others. I rather have 50 percent book sense and 50 percent common sense rather than 100% book sense. If you believe the biased LAtimes new source that proves what I wrote earlier that your I.Q. is a -1. Its people like you who spew hate!
in the U.S., applicants apparently receive “free points” based on race and ethnicity.
Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html