CPR and ENS Entrance Exams must be Reconsidered.

Having been a friend of so many teachers who joined either CPR or ENS, I have come to know the real nature of such sorts of exams. The main question is: Do those who succeeded deserve that success? And do those who failed deserve that failure? I have always asked myself this puzzling question since I myself became a teacher. Here, I am not judging anyone's competences, but rather I am just discussing the fact of deserving either success or failure.

In fact, I do not need to look for criteria by which we can judge the validity, the reliability and the like of these exams. I would instead choose to state vivid examples, the fact which will help us decide who deserves something and who does not. As far as my experience is concerned, I know some students who sat for both ENS and CPR and eventually turned out to fail that of CPR and made that of ENS. As we all know, ENS exams are more challenging than CPR ones. One might be shocked to hear such a paradox.

This latter can be explained either by the fact that those assigned to correct the applicants' exam papers do not take them seriously enough or by the fact that the testee is likely to do better at more challenging exams than at an exam which is a piece of cake. I believe no one dares to confirm the second hypothesis. More importantly, when it comes to failures, some good students who succeed in the written exam are turned down in the oral exam, taking other criteria apart from one's linguistic and communicative competence into consideration.

In this respect, importance is given to an interviewee's personality factors, and his or her linguistic tools are virtually overlooked in this phase. It is this fact which will in the long term create a remarkable disproportion between what is required of a prospective teacher and what they are really capapble of doing or providing for students who are waiting.

I could not agree more when Mark Twain was once quoted as saying it is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and undeservedly succeed when the experienced and informed fail.