Al-Khalil-Ma’an- Social media sites were ablaze with angry and denouncing comments, some of which mocked the nature of the Arabic language exam questions that high school students took on Monday, as they omitted patriotic lessons and poems… Accusations were also directed at the person who wrote the questions, that he does not live the reality that the Palestinian people live in, as they said about him: “The person who wrote the questions is a linguistic expert, not an expert in teaching the Arabic language, and he did not take into account the individual, mental and psychological differences among the students.
A specialist in Arabic language sciences demanded that the students be compensated with an increase of 15 marks over the students’ marks after correcting the exam.
One of the posts said: ‘The person who asked the questions did not experience what the Palestinians experienced in this exceptional and difficult year, as if he was sending a message to the student (I studied or I did not study, I was ti
red or I was not tired, I attended or I was absent, you will not do well).
A comment by the mother of a high school student said: ‘I am a teacher and I taught my son the literary subject.. The exam is difficult, why do you do this to the students? The conditions that the student is experiencing are not enough!’
Another comment said: ‘The exam is difficult, Your Honor. It does not measure the students’ abilities in their curriculum… Rather, it measures their knowledge of language, grammar, and morphology, and they are not specialists.’
To find out the depth of the pain and sadness that loomed over the students and their families, I interviewed a specialist in Arabic language, who refused to reveal his name, and he refuted the exam, saying: ‘The exam is long, as the student needs about 40 minutes, just to read the questions, and it took me about 31 minutes to read the exam carefully and think, in addition to the fact that reading the questions is tiring to the eyes, requires more coordination, and the spac
e between the paragraphs should be a little larger.’
The specialist added: ‘The questions were based on induction, many of them from the book, but they were not in the style of the book, so they needed an expert, i.e. a teacher, to answer them, not the one who explained it.’
Regarding parsing, only one word was parsed from the lessons of the book, and the rest of the words were mentioned in the lessons of previous classes, and it was appropriate for the word to be taken from the previous lessons and the majority from the students’ lessons. Also, an important subject and many lessons of questions were neglected, so they did not have any presence. There are more important lessons. And patriotic poems were absent.
The expert explained that for the morphological subject, the test maker avoided all the words in the book related to morphological topics, and came with external examples. In the pieces, the focus was also on analytical questions, and the attendance rate for questions in the pieces lessons was zero,
and the questions came according to the vision of the questioner for the pieces, and the question was woven around them, so that the question became according to the reader’s understanding.
He stressed that the questions were set for the distinguished and outstanding students, and did not take into account the differences between the students, as he said: ‘All the questions extracted from the pieces and texts focused on the outstanding student, with the intention that they were directed to the distinguished student and did not take into account the differences of the students.’
He also called on the Ministry of Education to add 15 marks after correcting the exam for each male and female student, and thus they will be treated fairly.
He said: ‘Someone might say: There are students whose score was 90% and others’ score was 95%. We tell them: This is the distinguished group for whom the questions were written, and the exam makers researched about them.’
The specialist in Arabic language sciences praised the
author of the questions, saying: ‘I did not find any grammatical or typographical error. The author of the questions is a linguist and may be a university lecturer, and this is to his credit, with the emphasis being that he is a linguist and has no experience in teaching.’
Source: Maan News Agency
