Exam time cruelty

So, my first exam of the term is behind me: English Vocabulary. The students were concerned about this one for the past month or so, constantly asking me if it was going to be difficult. I was always on-message when I told them "if you've been doing your assigned homework this will be an easy exam".

This is literally the case.

The course texts for this class are a pair of books called English Vocabulary in Use and Test Your English Vocabulary in Use. I assigned homework in the form of the mini-tests in the latter every week to be done for the next class. Each class I would spot-check the homework by taking one of the mini-tests and grading it. Each mini-test is worth 30 points (in question sets that varied from 1 point to 15 points each). I was getting an astonishing number of people passing in mini-tests with scores of 29 and 30. Well, astonishing unless you noted that the back of the book had answers to all the questions.

The silly students thought I wouldn't notice. (Hint: if you're copying the errors from the textbook's answer page, I'm going to notice!)

So, back to the exam. For the exam I made up eight pages worth 20 points each. Each page had exercises taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. I did eight pages but each student only had 3. This was done as an anti-cheating mechanism: no student was going to be sitting next to someone with the same mix of exam questions and at first glance it's going to look like I actually did what I had threatened: made 31 different exams. (Cheating is an epidemic in Chinese academic environments, you see.) But the key is something I have to stress again: each question was taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. So quite literally this exam would have been a cakewalk for the students who did their homework.

I haven't graded the exams formally yet, but I have glanced over them rapidly as a sampler. There's going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over this one.

Maybe writing the following on the board in bright, cheery red letters before the exam was going overboard:

EXAMS ARE FUN!
(for the teachers...)