After college, I got a job teaching English in Japan at a private high school associated "technical college" that shared the same campus. Unlike many of the foreign English teachers in Japan (at least at the high school level), I was hired directly by the school rather than through a third party program. This meant that I was responsible for creating and administering tests in my classes.
At the high school, I was teaching a class called "English Conversation" to all of the students. There were over 600, and I saw them in groups of 45 or so once a week for 50 minutes. (In most Japanese schools, the students stay with the same "homeroom" group all day, and the teachers move from classroom to classroom rather than the other way around.) The students were what might be called "false beginners" -- they had been studying English for at least three years in junior high school, but tended to not have much in the way of productive ability. My lessons consisted of the usual tropes -- introductions, favorite things, daily schedule, etc.
When the mid-term tests rolled around, I had only seen each group for a couple of classes. Nevertheless, I was expected to give them a mid-term just like all of the other subjects. Tests were by subject and class year, so all first year students would take their math test while all second year were taking their history test, and so on. I put together a short multiple-choice quiz based on the handful of phrases that I had taught up to that point ("How are you? a) I am fine, b) I am a student, c) My name is Kenta, d) Yes, I do", etc.). I anticipated that the test would take about 15 - 20 minutes for the students to finish.
The evening before the exams, the lead English teacher told me that because the class was "English Conversation," I should deliver the test a "listening" test. Not only that, the test needed to fill the entire 50 minute exam period, otherwise the students might get rowdy and disrupt the "real" tests being given in the other subjects. Because there wasn't enough time to rewrite everything from scratch, the only solution was to deliver the test "live" over the school's PA system. (Because homerooms were grouped by class year on different floors of the building, it was possible to target just the relevant rooms with the PA system.)
The day of the test, I sat before the announcer's microphone on the school's PA system and proceeded to read my multiple-choice test out loud, as s-l-o-w-l-y a-s p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e to take up as much of the 50 minute period as I could. Towards the end of the quiz, when I was really trying to stretch things out, I think that there was a good 5 seconds or more between the item number, the prompt, the letter of each option, and the text of each options. Try it yourself to get an idea of how absurd the whole thing sounded:
1. (5 sec) How are you? (5 sec)
a. (5 sec) I am fine (5 sec)
b. (5 sec) I am a student (5 sec)
c. (5 sec) My name is Kenta (5 sec)
d. (5 sec) Yes, I do (5 sec)
After this dismal mid-term experience, I tried to create a longer "script" for the final exam, enlisting the help of another English teacher to play my counterpart in short conversations and basing the questions on the contents of the conversations rather than grammatical points. This was better, but we were still trying to speed up or slow down the delivery based on the amount of time left in the test period, and the absurdity of the situation caused us to giggle uncontrollably throughout -- thank heavens for the mute button on the PA console!
By my third go round, I had moved to prerecording everything on cassettes. The moral of the story? Never try to do a listening test "live."
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