Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Friday, Apr 27, 2007 - 01:17 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- -
Questionspotting

You've heard of birdspotters, and perhaps even trainspotters, but undoubtedly the most popular spotting pastime amongst students here is questionspotting.

We usually get into it at a young age; Many a parent has made a gift to their child of a collection of O-Level Ten-Year Series books, the tried and trusted introductionary texts to this fascinating hobby. The more adventurous dip into it even earlier, with suitably simplified PSLE Practice Papers, chockful of vivid and insightful examples to give the young enthuasiast a solid foundation in identifying popular questions. Some parents are so serious that they pay older spotters to accompany their young ones on their journeys, in an archaic process fondly called "tuition", where the accumulated experience of the senior inevitably rubs off on the initiate.

Ah, many doubtless remember their first sighting - that magical moment when, glancing through a fibrous landscape of words, the eyes positively identified a specimen indelibly committed to the memory by countless hours of poring through the abovementioned fieldguides. The mind will instinctively refuse to believe; Could this be it? Then realization washes over the new spotter, as he mentally confirms his finding - Keyword "Explain"? Check. "Three ways"? Check.

Letter after letter is carefully scrutinized, but the sighting is eventually confirmed - from something as mundane as a common April-1997 Short-Answer-Question, to the more fanciful Stamford-Secondary-Express-Stream-2001-
Makeup-Paper-Additional-Question, each one is special by itself, to be savoured.

Joyfully, the spotter will then make a note of his findings in what in the lingo of the sport is called an "exam booklet", where it is traditional to repeat the standard characteristics of the particular question as noted in the fieldguide. For the simple questions, it may be as brief as noting down a single character representing the variant, generally "A", "B", "C", "D" or more rarely "E". For the complex questions, the treatment is usually much more involved - essays of upwards a thousand words are not unknown, and celebrated is the spotter who manages to regurgitate all the relevant features into his booklet.

These star spotters are rewarded with the equivalent of boy scout patches, though in a less flashy manner - upon passing through a given age category, they receive a "certificate" or "transcript" indicating their general aptitude and proficiency at spotting. Of course, some miscreants invariably slip through the cracks and manage to cheat the system, making a mockery of the art. The lesser evil is "mugging", which is often recognized as spotting done in poor style; Muggers actually do the questions, and worse are prone to sometimes rely on suspicious sources, such as "assignments" and "tutorials" which good spotters know are unlikely to be sighted twice in the same environment so soon again. Extremely bad form.

While muggers are disdainfully accepted in spotter society, those who actually understand the questions are just outcasts; Oh, the problem is not with the understanding per se. Some well-known spotters have admitted to understanding a handful of the questions they have spotted, and maybe even hold slightly different opinions from the fieldguides - A little eccentricity is only to be expected. However, actually aiming to understand the general concepts behind the questions is just horribly unsportsmanlike, though legal. Imagine, if one actually understood, one could actually return from the journey with an answer to every question, as if one had genuinely spotted each of them, without the possibility of glorious failure. Where is the challenge in that?

It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. It takes the very soul from the sport, spitting upon the heroic defeats of elders who ran the gauntlet without resorting to such deception. Ask the men on the street - likely it will not be long before you come upon one with such a tale to tell. He will close his eyes, sigh and rub his grizzled chin, and regale you with his personal drama, the time when, all those long years ago, he messed up by preparing only for the Human Geography family, then on his trip only Physical Geography specimens could be seen. He will tell of the pain of recognizing the questions, but having no recollection of their characteristics, nothing to record in his empty exam booklet; Of the sadness felt when turning in that empty booklet; Of the despair when receiving his less-than-stellar certificate.

But, he will not forget to say: He is proud of himself. Proud of staying true to the path, of not sullying the name of spotting with mugging, understanding, or heaven forbid, flair. And to this day, he spots; 4-D numbers from the wreckage of cars, stock tips from the squiggly graphs in the financial pages, can't-lose bets from the top neighbourhood punter. One cannot help but admire this class of man.

(The author of this article was inspired to write this tribute to spotting by his recent experience in a Macroeconomics examination for which he had only several hours to study for, courtesy of the unmissable Man Utd vs AC Milan Champions League semi-final at 3 a.m. the morning before the 1 p.m. paper. Ostensibly he was not the only one to watch the match, though, as the release of the candidates after the examination was delayed by half an hour because some guy fell asleep on his MCQ OMR form and neglected to hand it in)

comments (1) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: Wot A Comeback


Related Posts:
Careless, careless
Birthday CNY
Der Meaning
On the Theory of Games
Increasing Muggosity
Back to top




1 comment

qwergo said...
wah so haolian


April 28, 2007 - 19:33 SGT     

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.