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Alex Lo

My Take | Baptist University students should go back to primary school

Their protest against being given a fail mark in what is an easy Mandarin test serves only to highlight their linguistic incompetence

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Hong Kong Baptist University is a publicly funded tertiary institution located in Kowloon Tong. Photo: Shutterstock
Alex Loin Toronto

A group of angry students stormed the Baptist University language centre, then threatened and harassed its staff for more than eight hours. By now, you have probably seen a video clip, which has gone viral, showing how student union president Lau Tsz-kei and others physically intimidated staff and shouted obscenities at them.

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The students were upset that 70 per cent of those who took a recent Mandarin exam flunked it and demanded to be shown the exam-marking instructions.

That piqued my curiosity about the test itself. Was it a nefarious ploy by school administers with a pro-China agenda to deliberately make it so tough that few would pass it and everyone else would be forced to take mandatory classes in the “communist” language to graduate? I downloaded a test sample. What shocked me was how easy it was as to be almost laughable. The first part is to read aloud a short passage. The sample I have is about a family taking a walk in the countryside, written at a level of Chinese you would encounter in a textbook for primary schoolers. 

The second involves picking out phrases and sentences that are typical of either Cantonese or Mandarin. One or the other: you would pass even if you only knew Cantonese!

The third part, however, is my favourite. It presents several situations in which you are required to make a polite or presentable response in Mandarin. Examples include placating an angry customer at a restaurant if you are a waiter; and giving a short speech on taking every opportunity to practise writing Chinese words by hand instead of relying on keyboard typing, often assisted by language software. 

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Well, given the level of rudeness and aggressiveness typical of many of our student leaders today, I can understand why some may fail this part of the test; shouting obscenities at your customer or lecture audience just won’t do.

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