ABSTRACT
As the first term neared its end, I was scrambling to finish my oral exams: my own attempt to test my students in English without actually, well, giving exams. I detested exams, and felt that they were very inaccurate and unfair for a host of reasons. My required exam for sophomore oral English consisted of five- to ten-minute one-on-one conversations, mostly about the students themselves: their lives, aspirations, home-towns and provinces. (Interestingly, virtually all of my Chinese students described the distances from their homes to Harbin by a single form of measurement: the number of hours spent on a train.)
