“How do you feel?” Zhao Yao asked immediately as they exited the examination hall.
“Not great. The questions were really strange, it’s hard to describe!” Fan Rui said, frowning. In fact, all the students who had taken the exam were frowning. The exam questions were too bizarre.
They had initially assumed the exam would be designed according to standard college entrance examination questions. For example, the Chinese paper would surely cover fill-in-the-blanks, classical Chinese passages, reading comprehension, and short essays.
As for mathematics, it would naturally progress from easier to more difficult problems.
However, when Fan Rui actually received the test paper, he was stunned. The Chinese paper had no essay, no classical Chinese passages, and not even reading comprehension.
There were, however, many fill-in-the-blank questions. The first side of the entire paper was filled with them. What’s more, these fill-in-the-blanks didn't require filling in based on classic articles or ancient texts, meaning they didn't test memorization or recall ability.
Logically, poor students should have been ecstatic at this point, because fill-in-the-blanks are difficult precisely because they rely on memorization and recall. The college entrance exam requires memorizing hundreds of articles and poems, and it's common to misremember or miss a word. Most poor students simply couldn't remember them.
These fill-in-the-blanks provided a sentence with a portion missing, requiring the student to fill in the words to answer. Therefore, this type of question should have been very easy.
It looked incredibly simple, yet Fan Rui was sweating profusely while answering.
For instance, the first question provided five identical sentences and asked the student to add two words to each sentence. The words could be added anywhere, be the same or different, but the requirement was that the five originally identical sentences must express five completely different meanings.
Initially, Fan Rui thought this question was easy, but upon attempting it, he realized how incredibly difficult it was. After all, a fixed piece of text generally conveys a specific meaning. Completing a reversal of meaning solely by adding two words might be manageable for two sentences, but for three, it would require immense effort, and for four, one would practically be on their knees.
Fan Rui, in the end, only managed to write four sentences. He left the fifth answer blank, utterly stumped.
In addition, there was a long sentence with more than a dozen words clearly missing, and the examinee was asked to fill in words. However, the question didn't specify how many words to fill in, nor did it require any specific meaning. It simply asked to fill in words.
This sounded even easier, but the problem was that no one had ever seen this text before, so no one knew the correct answer. They could only fill in words based on their own guesses. Under such a rigid, rote-learning-oriented education system, students who relied on forced memorization to answer were essentially numb.
There were many similar strange questions among the fill-in-the-blanks. Fan Rui normally finished the fill-in-the-blanks section of the college entrance exam in about five minutes.
However, these fill-in-the-blanks took him over thirty minutes, and about one-third of them remained unanswered, as he had no idea how to solve them.
Following the fill-in-the-blanks were very peculiar question types called sentence modification.
This was also a question type Fan Rui had never encountered before.
The first question required sentence condensation. It first provided the students with a very famous passage from Zhu Ziqing's "The Backs of My Father":
“I said, ‘Father, you go.’ He looked out of the carriage and said, ‘I’ll go buy some oranges. You stay right here and don’t move.’ I saw the railing outside the platform… When his figure was lost in the bustling crowd and could no longer be found, I came back in and sat down, and my tears came again.”
The entire passage was quite long, a total of 462 characters. To avoid padding, these were not all listed.
So, what was the requirement for this passage?
The answer was to describe all the content and emotional activities in the passage using the shortest possible text.
Some might say, isn't this simple? Isn't it just text condensation?
Just write, "My dad bought me oranges, and I cried!" Done!
Well, a poor student might write that. A slightly better poor student might write, “Father buys oranges, cries.” Four characters, and it's all done.
But the critical point was that the question required the condensation to capture all the content and psychological activities. And the emotional and psychological complexities contained within this passage by Zhu Ziqing could fill tens of thousands of words in a thesis.
Now, the question demanded maximum condensation while fully reflecting the emotions, making the difficulty level incredibly high. It required students to possess a masterful command of language and expression of emotions.
Fan Rui alone spent 10 minutes on this single question, yet he still used nearly a hundred characters. He felt like he was about to collapse.
Following the text condensation was expansion. It provided the phrase “Father buys oranges,” just three words, and required the student to write a paragraph of at least 300 characters, all centered around the event of the father buying oranges. However, it demanded the inclusion of 10 different characters, the occurrence of 5 different events, and the expression of at least three complex emotions.
Alright, Fan Rui was once again close to collapsing.
After expansion, there was an even more bizarre question called logical reasoning.
For example, the question first presented an event: “A normal cat participated in the college entrance examination and scored 650.”
Seeing this sentence, one could tell this was either a mythical story or a surrealist article. In reality, such a thing was impossible.
Then, the requirement of this question was to explain how this event occurred using the most rigorous logic and language, without any deviation from real-world logic. If there were any, it asked the student to use more detailed logical reasoning to prove their logic was correct. xxs壹贰
Good heavens, upon seeing this question, Fan Rui felt like he was going to collapse again.
He initially finished this question in just five minutes. The logical process was: the cat’s owner suffered from severe psychological disorders and autism, requiring animal therapy and companionship. Therefore, with the teacher’s permission, they brought the cat to participate in the college entrance exam. The cat then sat obediently on the desk throughout the exam, accompanying the protagonist.
Finally, the protagonist felt that the cat, like himself, had completed the college entrance exam. So, they wrote the cat’s name in the candidate name field, and thus the cat scored 650.
Initially, Fan Rui thought his logic was perfect. But then he realized something was wrong. According to normal logic, the candidate name field could only have one name; writing the cat’s name would render the exam score invalid.
So, Fan Rui changed it to writing the cat’s name in the answer sheet section. But this also seemed incorrect. This way, it wouldn't count as the cat participating in the exam… Faced with this logical problem, Fan Rui pondered for a long time and finally added a logical premise: the cat and the owner shared the same name, thereby filling this logical loophole.
Then he felt it was still not right. It seemed that such a thing wouldn't be approved just by the teacher. So, he changed it to receiving special approval from the Ministry of Education.
In short, it took five minutes to answer, and then an additional hour to perfect the entire article’s logic. The original sentence, less than 100 characters, was expanded to nearly 500 characters to eliminate any obvious logical flaws. Fan Rui was completely drained.
And finally, the most bizarre question of all was to design text.
The question first presented 20 ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions and their corresponding modern characters.
So, do you think the question asked candidates to simplify other oracle bone inscriptions into modern characters?
On the contrary, it then provided three modern characters: Zhao, Han, and Wei, and asked the candidates to transform these three characters into oracle bone inscriptions according to their own ideas.
It was also specifically pointed out that the oracle bone inscriptions corresponding to these three characters had not been discovered to this day, or that these three characters simply did not exist in the oracle bone script. Therefore, no candidate who was proficient in oracle bone inscriptions could cheat. Moreover, candidates were free to express themselves, as this question primarily tested their divergent thinking ability regarding language.
Good heavens, Fan Rui wished he could smash his head against the ground and end this most peculiar exam of his life.
Fortunately, unlike the college entrance exam, this test had no time limit, or rather, it was 12 hours, from 8 AM to 8 PM. During meal times, people would specifically deliver simple, easy-to-eat food like bread and milk.
Having lunch in the examination hall was also an unprecedented experience.
Fan Rui didn't know how he managed to complete the entire test paper. When he left, it was already 4 PM. Although there were still four hours left, Fan Rui didn't want to stay a second longer.
As soon as he left the school gate, he saw Zhao Yao waiting for him.
“When did you finish?” Fan Rui asked curiously, seeing that Zhao Yao had been waiting for a long time.
“I finished after lunch!” Zhao Yao said.
“So quickly!” Fan Rui was shocked. Lunch was served precisely at noon, meaning Zhao Yao had finished the exam half an hour earlier than him.
“Not quickly. I heard some candidates left in less than 10 minutes, and one-third of the candidates finished and left within an hour. They even exclaimed that the test paper was too easy!” Zhao Yao said with a grin.
“Easy?” Fan Rui felt a chill run down his spine. This test paper was called easy?
“Don’t get me wrong, in the eyes of those underachievers, this test paper doesn't require memorization or recall, nor does it have essays. It only asks to write some sentences and fill in some words, so isn’t it too easy?” Zhao Yao said with a smile. “However, we all know that those who can leave the exam hall within an hour are basically bluffing!”
“Then what about your four hours? And what about my eight hours?” Fan Rui asked impatiently.
“Don’t say that. I just feel that this exam’s questions are particularly suited for me. You don’t know how excited I was when I saw these questions. I never imagined that a Chinese exam could be set up like this. If college entrance exams in the future had such questions, it would be fantastic!” Zhao Yao said excitedly, while Fan Rui almost weakened to his knees at the thought of such questions in future college entrance exams.
[PS: A quick survey, what do you all think of these Chinese exam questions? Which ones can better assess a person’s Chinese ability?]