2007-10-08

Select the least incorrect answer

Being a native English speaker, I was originally exempt from taking the TOEIC exam at work, but this morning I received an e-mail from my two-up manager saying that everyone in our department had to sit the exam after all, and so I arranged with HR to let me into the examination room.

The listening section was... slightly boring. To the point that my mind started wandering, hahaha. Oops.

And the reading section was... perplexing. The written questions had errors in them. Not just the "choose what's wrong" type of questions, I'm referring to the fill-in-the-blank questions and others, too. I started chuckling, which probably didn't help relax the other colleague in the room.

Let me give you an example of how ridiculous it was; I copied this down from the exam. Multiple choice question, choose one part of the sentence that should be corrected or rewritten:
(A) There's at least several of reasons that (B) explained why the sales manager (C) has quitted his job that (D) is envied by most people in the office.
Gee, can I select (A), (C), and other errors not listed in the choices?!

2 comments:

Ben said...

Haha, yeah, I remember those. I took a bunch of them at the interviews. In most cases, the companies would just waive that test, but some were strict and said I had to go through it anyway. And in most instances, I came out of the exam with my answers plus a number of corrections on their exams.

I can't believe they don't run those things by some native English speaker (with decent spelling/grammar skills) before using it as their official benchmark for finding people. Yeesh.

Kevin said...

I think that I only write the English test for one of companies I had interviewing with. I passed with good mark.