Hmmm, I think I will rant about the National Spanish exam for a few....

Well, let's start by saying my attention span on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest) is a 3 or 4. But that is irrelevant until you understand the layout of the test. So there is a listening section, which I don't mind, mostly because we do them in class and they are usually not too difficult. So there are three parts to the listening section:
Part 1: You hear (13) questions read, one at a time, and there are four choices for answers for each question. The question is only read once (everytime we do something similar in class, they ALWAYS read the question twice), and you have twenty seconds to find an answer. So, you must figure out what the question is asking, as it is in spanish, and then translate the answers in your head and fill in the circle. You have thirteen total.

Part 2: You hear a conversation between two native-Spanish speakers that lasts about 30-45 seconds. Then you are asked a question in Spanish and given four possible choices. Paying attention during the conversation and processing it at hte same time is very very difficult. Then you have twenty seconds to figure out the answer. Both the conversation and teh question are only read once. You have about nine of these.

Part 3: A lot like part 2, except you have a passage instead of a conversation. Teh passage is usually something random like the economics of Chile, or something. The same process still applies. It is read once, followed by a question, read once, and four answers written on paper.

So after you have suffered through an intense listening section, with no breaks, you have the written part of the test, which is basically a series of paragraphs that you read and fill in the blanks with the best answer choice. Not too hard, except that you sometimes have to figure out which of the eight or so tenses you know they want....

Oh well, it's over now!!! Hooray.

I might post more about the grades later.....