VCAA changes to VCE Chinese

[vox nihili]

A scaled score in Chinese  indicates a higher level of language fluency than the same score in any other language.

With above Polopopotamus. That's rubbish.

[qqla]

XJS and its respective weekend school spinoffs has effectively destroyed chinese at the vce level. Insider exam question 'guessing', sac ranking tampering, are all common practices employed, and I'm only just scratching the surface. XJS is meant to be a springboard for learning chinese. Instead, it's just a battlefield for competition, where an elitist attitude thrives amongst the 'more-gifted students' and higher-ups.

I've heard that VCAA introduced scaling for chinese as a way to compensate for the emergence of XJS. Believe it or not, XJS and scaling for chinese did not exist 20 years ago (I think XJS kicked off operations in 1992 or so). What VCAA was (and is still) trying to do is to simply, level the footing between the black-haired and non black haired.  It failed with generous scaling, which actually amplifies the counterintuitive effect for non-background speakers, as their scaled scores would be pushed back and scaled less, compared to the easy scaled 40's obtained by the background speaker.

Discriminating based on ability? PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTT. Are you kidding me. Are you REALLY kidding me. You're telling me, that I have to do some of English AND have it counted in my primary four, despite not speaking it at home, but that people who speak Chinese at home should be disadvantaged? What sort of stupid half-twisted logic is this? So we're being disadvantaged by the fact that we speak Chinese at home, and that we study it earlier? Well go have a cry VCAA, because penalising students from being good at Chinese is preposterous.

How is segregating skill levels disadvantaging or penalising anyone at all? By removing scaling, you're essentially removing a cog that's rather responsible for the disparity. If you have beginners up against beginners, and the advanced up against advanced, isn't that fair?
What about the other LOTEs like japanese and french? I'm not saying that those LOTE subjects are perfect, as there's heaps of stuff that is dodgy behind the scenes for all subjects, but would you ACTUALLY want your OWN CHILD, that started from scratch, to compete against kids that have been fed through XJS for their entire childhood? I sure as hell wouldn't.

I'm an ABC, second generation. I went to XJS for a year or two back in primary school, and dropped chinese completely until I got dragged back into it for VCE. I was extremely pleased with my result even though I couldn't write/read at all to save my life, but I can honestly say I did not deserve it. Why should I be worried or even be concerned about the disparity between the 'huang mao/from scratch student' with the 'xjs baby'? Because this is a problem that can really hurt the future of LOTE education. This is my children's future, and isn't something that should be treated lightly or glossed over at all.

Students should not be groomed to support an approach that encourages one to memorise essays and fancy chengyus you'll never see again for the rest of your life, for the sake of the '50 pursuit' in CSL. This is about learning a language, and if you can't align hard work together with good marks alongside the backdrop of a level playing-ground, then the subject is inherently broken.

[lzxnl]

XJS and its respective weekend school spinoffs has effectively destroyed chinese at the vce level. Insider exam question 'guessing', sac ranking tampering, are all common practices employed, and I'm only just scratching the surface. XJS is meant to be a springboard for learning chinese. Instead, it's just a battlefield for competition, where an elitist attitude thrives amongst the 'more-gifted students' and higher-ups.

I've heard that VCAA introduced scaling for chinese as a way to compensate for the emergence of XJS. Believe it or not, XJS and scaling for chinese did not exist 20 years ago (I think XJS kicked off operations in 1992 or so). What VCAA was (and is still) trying to do is to simply, level the footing between the black-haired and non black haired.  It failed with generous scaling, which actually amplifies the counterintuitive effect for non-background speakers, as their scaled scores would be pushed back and scaled less, compared to the easy scaled 40's obtained by the background speaker.

How is segregating skill levels disadvantaging or penalising anyone at all? By removing scaling, you're essentially removing a cog that's rather responsible for the disparity. If you have beginners up against beginners, and the advanced up against advanced, isn't that fair?
those LOTE subjects are perfect, as there's heaps of stuff that is dodgy behind the scenes for all subjects, but would you ACTUALLY want your OWN CHILD, that started from scratch, to compete against kids that have been fed through XJS for their entire childhood? I sure as hell wouldn't.

VCAA has been, and is always trying to solve this disparity between the 'huang mao/from scratch student' with the 'xjs baby'.

I'm an ABC, second generation. I went to XJS for a year or two back in primary school, and dropped chinese completely until I got dragged back into it for VCE. I was extremely pleased with my result even though I couldn't write/read at all to save my life, but I can honestly say I did not deserve it.

Students should not be groomed to support an approach that encourages one to memorise essays and fancy chengyus you'll never see again for the rest of your life, for the sake of the '50 pursuit' in CSL. This is about learning a language, and if you can't align hard work together with good marks alongside the backdrop of a level playing-ground, then the subject is inherently broken.

I'm not actually disagreeing with levelling the playing field. It is indeed saddening to see how Chinese SL is dominated by Chinese background students.
The only problem is, one of the recommendations was to force students in SL to move up to SLA solely because they've had experience with Chinese. Now, although that solves the problem for Chinese SL, those students moved up to SLA simply cannot cope. The gap between SL and SLA is similar to the gap between background and non-background students. The result is, for an equal amount of work, the students doing Chinese SL will do much better than those in SLA because the competition there is utterly ridiculous. I don't actually have any qualms with creating another Chinese subject with some form of incentive to lure the background SL students away. People here seem to think that the system is, right now, rigged in favour of us background speakers, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I just don't want us background speakers, who only have parents that speak Chinese to us, to be forced to compete with students that are again a massive stretch above us.
The aforementioned "discrimination based on ability" really just referred to this. A system needs to be implemented where students who are good at Chinese through hard work are rewarded. Making half the SL cohort do SLA will not achieve this. Giving them an incentive to leave regular Chinese SL for another subject would be more likely to.

[vox nihili]

I'm not actually disagreeing with levelling the playing field. It is indeed saddening to see how Chinese SL is dominated by Chinese background students.
The only problem is, one of the recommendations was to force students in SL to move up to SLA solely because they've had experience with Chinese. Now, although that solves the problem for Chinese SL, those students moved up to SLA simply cannot cope. The gap between SL and SLA is similar to the gap between background and non-background students. The result is, for an equal amount of work, the students doing Chinese SL will do much better than those in SLA because the competition there is utterly ridiculous. I don't actually have any qualms with creating another Chinese subject with some form of incentive to lure the background SL students away. People here seem to think that the system is, right now, rigged in favour of us background speakers, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I just don't want us background speakers, who only have parents that speak Chinese to us, to be forced to compete with students that are again a massive stretch above us.
The aforementioned "discrimination based on ability" really just referred to this. A system needs to be implemented where students who are good at Chinese through hard work are rewarded. Making half the SL cohort do SLA will not achieve this. Giving them an incentive to leave regular Chinese SL for another subject would be more likely to.

I think what we've really shown in this whole discussion is that this is a very, very tricky issue. Clearly the goal is to encourage students without a Chinese background to pursue Chinese. It's hard enough to get students to pursue LOTE full stop, so finding difficulties with the most "important" (which is bullshit but that's how the government sees it) LOTE really requires a response. The problem is that every sensible response is inherently racist and disadvantages students with a Chinese background... Then proficiency testing as well is far too cumbersome and costly. *sigh*

[qqla]

The gap between SL and SLA is similar to the gap between background and non-background students. The result is, for an equal amount of work, the students doing Chinese SL will do much better than those in SLA because the competition there is utterly ridiculous.

I just don't want us background speakers, who only have parents that speak Chinese to us, to be forced to compete with students that are again a massive stretch above us.

I think you're overstating the gap between SL and SLA. I know many kids that snuck in SL even though they were not only 'SLA-standard', but even had the 2 years (?) overseas thing well. Honky and singaporean students suffer in SLA as a result of that overseas chinese instruction bullshit.

At the high end, there are SL kids that have a very, very thorough grasp of the language that is marginally behind the high end of SLA, while the bottom end of SLA is similar to the majority of SL.

It is indeed a lazy bandaid approach by VCAA, but I'd argue it's still better than leaving the system as it is. SL scaling is ridiculous enough, and cutting SLA scaling to mimic japanese (think its 9 compared to 11 when you get 30) to compensate for the inflow isn't too bad as well.

[lzxnl]

I think you're overstating the gap between SL and SLA. I know many kids that snuck in SL even though they were not only 'SLA-standard', but even had the 2 years (?) overseas thing well. Honky and singaporean students suffer in SLA as a result of that overseas chinese instruction bullshit.

At the high end, there are SL kids that have a very, very thorough grasp of the language that is marginally behind the high end of SLA, while the bottom end of SLA is similar to the majority of SL.

It is indeed a lazy bandaid approach by VCAA, but I'd argue it's still better than leaving the system as it is. SL scaling is ridiculous enough, and cutting SLA scaling to mimic japanese (think its 9 compared to 11 when you get 30) to compensate for the inflow isn't too bad as well.

You've said it yourself; the bottom end of SLA is similar to SL. Then, students moving from SL to SLA would probably be at the bottom end. Chances are, they're not going to be able to overcome this deficit. Sure, the difference between bottom SLA and top SL might be small, but what about top SL and mid to high SLA? In the end, SL students may still be disadvantaged solely because they have a Chinese background.

Besides, as we've agreed on, this is a lazy approach that won't work. In the grand scheme of things, it might be better than the current system if VCAA's aim is to improve the non-Chinese enrolment in Chinese SL, but it'll kill off interest from background speakers. Then, we'll have a ridiculous scenario where the background speakers are deterred from learning Chinese.

[brightsky]

XJS and its respective weekend school spinoffs has effectively destroyed chinese at the vce level. Insider exam question 'guessing', sac ranking tampering, are all common practices employed, and I'm only just scratching the surface. XJS is meant to be a springboard for learning chinese. Instead, it's just a battlefield for competition, where an elitist attitude thrives amongst the 'more-gifted students' and higher-ups.

...

Students should not be groomed to support an approach that encourages one to memorise essays and fancy chengyus you'll never see again for the rest of your life, for the sake of the '50 pursuit' in CSL. This is about learning a language, and if you can't align hard work together with good marks alongside the backdrop of a level playing-ground, then the subject is inherently broken.

While I don't agree with everything in this post (especially the assertion that scaling was introduced for VCE Chinese because of the existence of XJS), as a 'XJS baby', I can vouch for what I have quoted above. XJS is a really good language school overall. Most of the classes are designed specially to improve students' language skills. It is only really the VCE Chinese classes which I have an issue with. It isn't actually XJS's fault that these classes are so bad...it is VCAA's. VCE Chinese has long fallen into degeneracy. The oral exam is meant to test how well students can express themselves in Chinese, not how well students can rote-learn 100,000 characters worth of text. The nature of the VCE oral exam means that students can prepare everything in advance. Indeed, those who do not memorize their responses are at a major disadvantage. This defeats the purpose of an oral exam. I can talk for days about the demerits of VCE Chinese. The bottom line is: the VCE Chinese course really needs to be revised. It is not XJS that needs to change. It is the VCE.

[watto_22]

Then, we'll have a ridiculous scenario where the background speakers are deterred from learning Chinese.

What about the ridiculous situation now where non-background speakers are deterred from learning Chinese?

[lzxnl]

What about the ridiculous situation now where non-background speakers are deterred from learning Chinese?

You've missed my point; I'm saying that the proposition isn't a solution.

[qqla]

Sure, the difference between bottom SLA and top SL might be small, but what about top SL and mid to high SLA?

The top tier of SL is definitely on par with mid-SLA, and arguably, not far behind top SLA. There are many many SL kids in XJS that are similar in proficiency to the "better" SLA students.

XJS is a really good language school overall. Most of the classes are designed specially to improve students' language skills. It is only really the VCE Chinese classes which I have an issue with. It isn't actually XJS's fault that these classes are so bad...it is VCAA's. VCE Chinese has long fallen into degeneracy. The oral exam is meant to test how well students can express themselves in Chinese, not how well students can rote-learn 100,000 characters worth of text.

I agree. XJS from prep to year 7 is perhaps the best way to get proficient in chinese at that age. There's nothing in melbourne that even comes remotely close to that experience of saturday mornings, repeating character after character in that little notepad book. I have nothing against XJS as an institute, just its awful handling of VCE chinese.

[2NE1]

XJS and its respective weekend school spinoffs has effectively destroyed chinese at the vce level. Insider exam question 'guessing', sac ranking tampering, are all common practices employed, and I'm only just scratching the surface. XJS is meant to be a springboard for learning chinese. Instead, it's just a battlefield for competition, where an elitist attitude thrives amongst the 'more-gifted students' and higher-ups.

I've heard that VCAA introduced scaling for chinese as a way to compensate for the emergence of XJS. Believe it or not, XJS and scaling for chinese did not exist 20 years ago (I think XJS kicked off operations in 1992 or so). What VCAA was (and is still) trying to do is to simply, level the footing between the black-haired and non black haired.  It failed with generous scaling, which actually amplifies the counterintuitive effect for non-background speakers, as their scaled scores would be pushed back and scaled less, compared to the easy scaled 40's obtained by the background speaker.

How is segregating skill levels disadvantaging or penalising anyone at all? By removing scaling, you're essentially removing a cog that's rather responsible for the disparity. If you have beginners up against beginners, and the advanced up against advanced, isn't that fair?
What about the other LOTEs like japanese and french? I'm not saying that those LOTE subjects are perfect, as there's heaps of stuff that is dodgy behind the scenes for all subjects, but would you ACTUALLY want your OWN CHILD, that started from scratch, to compete against kids that have been fed through XJS for their entire childhood? I sure as hell wouldn't.

I'm an ABC, second generation. I went to XJS for a year or two back in primary school, and dropped chinese completely until I got dragged back into it for VCE. I was extremely pleased with my result even though I couldn't write/read at all to save my life, but I can honestly say I did not deserve it. Why should I be worried or even be concerned about the disparity between the 'huang mao/from scratch student' with the 'xjs baby'? Because this is a problem that can really hurt the future of LOTE education. This is my children's future, and isn't something that should be treated lightly or glossed over at all.

Students should not be groomed to support an approach that encourages one to memorise essays and fancy chengyus you'll never see again for the rest of your life, for the sake of the '50 pursuit' in CSL. This is about learning a language, and if you can't align hard work together with good marks alongside the backdrop of a level playing-ground, then the subject is inherently broken.

So why is the blame suddenly shifting to XJS, and " level the footing between the black-haired and non black haired" are you serious? Well I'm telling you I have BLONDE hair and nothing has stopped me from achieving a study score I am satisfied with in Chinese SL.

[vox nihili]

This is just one of many flaws with the current LOTE system. A scaled score in Chinese  indicates a higher level of language fluency than the same score in any other language.

This girl got a 38 in Serbian. Good luck making the case that she isn't fluent. Nearly every single one of the smaller LOTE subjects could expect to produce students with much greater fluency than the Chinese cohort.

EDIT: moved my stuff out of the quote, sorry.

[qqla]

So why is the blame suddenly shifting to XJS, and " level the footing between the black-haired and non black haired" are you serious? Well I'm telling you I have BLONDE hair and nothing has stopped me from achieving a study score I am satisfied with in Chinese SL.

Good for you.

CSL results from 2013: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-features/news-in-education/vce/top-scorers#edusearch-subject-37.

Complete XJS domination.

Now compare this to http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-features/news-in-education/vce/top-scorers#edusearch-subject-53, and I don't know about you, but I reckon I can see A LOT better of a spread than CSL.

[2NE1]

Good for you.

CSL results from 2013: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-features/news-in-education/vce/top-scorers#edusearch-subject-37.

Complete XJS domination.

Now compare this to http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-features/news-in-education/vce/top-scorers#edusearch-subject-53, and I don't know about you, but I reckon I can see A LOT better of a spread than CSL.

I see your point, but you can not blame a school for achieving high results. It means they must be educating their students really well, not necessarily being dodgy like you think it is.  XJS dominates, what of it?

[qqla]

I see your point, but you can not blame a school for achieving high results. It means they must be educating their students really well, not necessarily being dodgy like you think it is.  XJS dominates, what of it?

'Educating their students really well' and advocating a questionable methodology that focuses on "teaching students" on how to groom themselves for the exam are two complete parallels. I have nothing against grooming yourself for an exam, how else are you going to succeed in any subject? I'm only against the 'what and how' that happens in the making.

Students! This week, I'm going to photocopy 20 copies of this flawless evaluative essay that an ex-student wrote, make sure you guys go home and copy it a few times! Don't write imaginary pieces if you don't want to fail! Memorise this paragraph of bs so that you'll sound ever so eloquent in front of the examiner for your oral! Slip this chengyu in, oh and make sure that if you see a bald man in his 50s with a twitchy eye give him a wink after you leave!

I don't think that's 'educating your students'. I don't even think it qualifies as spoonfeeding.

I've heard a lot worse from older graduates from XJS, but if you can't see past the sketchy stuff XJS pulls behind the scenes, especially as a high-achieving XJS student, then I just guess you aren't looking hard enough.

Indeed, XJS cannot be entirely blamed, as we can already tell, that VCE chinese is a flawed subject. However, its way of handling students is just saddening, especially for a school of their caliber that really should be devoted to provoking interest for the Chinese language, not singling out the potential 'good students' and bragging year after year about their 40+ intake.

After all, isn't that what learning a language is all about? Isn't this the goal that all LOTE teachers across the world should have in mind, immersing students so that they are able to have a genuine appreciation for a foreign language?