Minor glitches reported during Tohoku entrance exams
TOKYO —
The National Center for University Entrance Examinations, the independent administrative institution that oversees Japan’s national university entrance exams, said Monday that the two-day tests took place on Saturday and Sunday, with only some minor glitches in the Tohoku area, despite fears of disruption in the tsunami-hit region.
The standardized exam is used to grade students applying to public and private universities in Japan. According to the Education Ministry, 555,537 students took the exam at 709 locations across the country, down 3,447 on last year.
Officials said that although serious disruption was avoided, reports of minor problems remained. For example, 200 IC players intended for use in the English listening test were not delivered to some test centers in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, the institute said. It added that 18 students in 14 test centers experienced malfunctioning IC players.
The institute also reported that one student was taken ill in Kesennuma while waiting for the IC players to be delivered and that 49 students in Iwate experienced disruption during their Japanese language test due to a noisy heating system.
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noriyosan73
If Japan really cared about educating people at the university level, it would increase the importance of high school grades, decrease the importance of the nation-wide grade, and lower the the cost of tuition. In the USA the higher the rating of the university by pubic opinion or teachers unions, the higher the tuition cost. Japan is losing its most valuable people based on one test day. Consider some options now.
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Fadamor
Sadly, the U.S. ratings have almost nothing to do with education and everything to do with how well their football/basketball team does. The tuition is high at an Alabama or LSU school not because the education is better, but because the school is so packed with sports fans that they have to raise tuition until demand is reduced to the level of empty seats.
While Japan's tiered system of universities seems unfair (to us Americans) at first glance, it's not really that different than what we use here with our SAT scores. The only major difference is that in Japan, they have a customized test for each school (and the student must take each test for each school he/she wants to apply to), while in the U.S. there is basically a single test that gets shopped around to prospective colleges. In both countries' cases the college makes an evaluation based on how well the applicant scored. I'll be ready to apply at Todai in about 400 years.
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