The writing section of the College Entrance Exam’s English test on Friday has prompted heated discussion among test-takers who are not only amused at the creative way it employed a four-panel comic strip featuring an encounter between a boy and a girl, but also the quality of the drawing.
“Who did that drawing?” was a question that appeared to be more intriguing to the test-takers than the exam paper itself.
In response to criticism by some students that “the drawing was so ugly,” the National Teachers’ Association suggested the College Entrance Examination Center, which presides over college entrance exams, should improve the quality of drawings in exam papers. It was later revealed that the drawing was by a teacher who set the exam paper.
Photo from the College Entrance Examination Center’s test questionnaire
The first three panels of the four-panel comic show a boy singing a song with guitar outside an apartment building where he had met a girl at a costume party and then depicts people popping their heads out of the windows to scold the boy.
With the fourth panel left blank, students were required to write a story based on the first three panels of the drawing and imagine what happened in the fourth.
A student surnamed Chu (褚) from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School wrote that the boy was sent to a hospital after a heart attack which occurred when he realized that without makeup the girl was not the beauty he saw at the party, but more like “a dinosaur girl.”
The story created by a student surnamed Chen (陳) from St Bonaventure Girls’ Senior High School had a happy ending, with the boy finally winning the hearts of the girl and her neighbors as he kept singing despite being berated and sworn at.
Yeh Ting-kuang (葉庭光), a student from the National Taichung First Senior High School, told a story which saw the boy go back home to concentrate on preparing for a college entrance exam after being rejected, linking the plot in the story to the author’s real life.
A student from Kaohsiung wrote a story where the girl was interested in the boy, but he ended up being sent to a police station as his singing late at night not only disturbed the neighbors, but also showed that he lacked morals.
The drawing drew mixed reactions from students.
Some students praised the creativity of the writing section and said the drawing was an easy topic to write a story about, while some students said the drawing was so bad that they were curious to know who had done it.
A student left a message on an Internet discussion board saying that in his story he wrote that the girl was actually a man because she was so ugly in the drawing, adding that he wondered if he would be able to score well in the writing section because he had mocked the illustration.
Kuo Huei-min (郭慧敏), a teacher of the National Chung Ho Senior High School, said the National Teachers’ Association had noted the drawing when looking into the exam paper and that teachers were of the opinion that well-drawn images in the writing section were important.
Nowadays, children are sensitive to visual materials and are good at interpreting graphics, Kuo said.
Mu Tzung-ssann (牟宗燦), director of the center, said it would take the opinions into consideration and make improvements.
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