There are various serious and undeniable challenges that most developing countries are up

against one of which is the enormous young population and the second of which is limited
resources which means, in effect, that the number of good schools and teachers is far below
adequate. It goes without saying that every parent desires to get his child in pole position and
eventually, into these few good schools. It doesnt take a genius to guess what follows: a
system best compared to the hurdles where classroom activities are dominated by frequent
road blocks in the form of tests which the teacher has no choice but to assign pride of place in
his teaching. As soon as one is over, preparation begins for the next and this continues ad
infinitum. Teaching is replaced by training for tests, all those crucial cognitive skills best
developed by encouraging students to reflect on, critique and comment on facts i.e. those
crucial slow application tasks are forsaken for the teaching of shortcuts and memorization
techniques designed to help students excel on tests. A certain mental dexterity if you like is
most certainly achieved and students in this country, Turkey, often ace the SAT but the price
that is paid is very high indeed. This emphasis on test techniques is by no means limited to
science and maths; you would be astonished to discover that social sciences and even
literature are tested in the same way. It is very easy for an overworked, underpaid teacher
who is obsessed with pass and failure rates to succumb considering the amount of material
that needs to be covered. The latter also seems to lead to an emphasis on facts like dates,
treaties, names rather than the relationships between these facts; this in turn means
memorization is in and thinking is out. Students can rattle off all the mountain ranges and
mountains in the country for instance but be unable to tell you what the significance is of
having mountain ranges parallel to the coast. They will be able to parrot a long list of treaties
without being able to discuss what the significance of various items in the said treaties was.
The whole business becomes truly bizarre when literature is considered. Multiple choice
literature tests pain me to say the least despite being able to see the reasons for their
existence. What is far worse is literature tests that demand the reciting of the teachers views
on a piece of poetry or short story. There is one test question I shall never forget and it went
something like this: Yunus Emre .. (in Turkish: Yunus Emre
dir). For those of you who speak Turkish, what was required was:
Yunus Emrenin iirlerinedeki doa tasvirleri usta bir ressamn elinded km gibidir. For
those of you who dont, this roughly translates as Yunus Emres descriptions of nature are like
the renditions of a good painter. Nothing else, and I mean nothing else, would do. How on
earth do you learn to get it right I remember enquiring of this student who simply explained
that one kept getting zeros until the penny dropped. Is it any wonder that so few people like
to read? Not only that; does it come as any surprise that so many eighteen year olds appear so
terribly ignorant. Over the years, my first impression of my freshman class at the university
where I teach one of the top English medium universities in the country has been that they
were mentally challenged to say the least. Commonsense and knowledge of the grueling
process they suffer through to get into university assured me that this could not be the case;
yet the impression persisted. The reason is a simple rule of thumb: facts that are learned in
school are far more easily forgotten than cognitive skills such as applying principles or
interpreting new experiments, for instance, based on prior knowledge. In our Shakespeare
class back when I was a student, we read Macbeth one term and Hamlet the next, which
taught us how to go about reading Shakespeare that being the ultimate purpose of the

exercise. I then went on to develop a great love for the literature of the period and eventually
wrote my thesis on Christopher Marlow. This aside, think back, if you will, to all that has
been said about teaching and the dilemma is solved: students fed a diet of facts to the
exclusion of all else cant possibly be expected to produce any other impression. Couple all
that has been discussed thus far with the modern emphasis on speed and short cuts like in the
case of texting, e-mail speak, ticking drop down boxes and abuse of technology and is it any
surprise that undergraduates cannot summarize, critique, provide correct in-citations or
paraphrase?
There is one teaching and testing technique that has become all but obsolete in a lot of places
certainly in this country with grave consequences. What I am referring to is the writing of
essays, papers, dissertations, summaries, answering essay type questions and the like. This
new trend has even started to encroach on universities I understand. A former student who I
came across on the bus to school and who is reading sociology described the multiple choice
sociology test he had had in all its lurid details. I fail to be able to see how one can correctly
assess a students in depth understanding of sociology in this way but I digress. Before going
any further, I must reiterate that two of the reasons why these activities have fallen by the
way side are sheer numbers and the punishing test schedule described above. The damage has
been extensive though. Paraphrasing is an activity that should creep in, if you like, on day
one and parroting, the current practice, should be strictly forbidden. In the German school in
Istanbul, which prepares students for the Abitur, students are absolutely forbidden to
answer questions in the language of the text; they are required to use their own words. This is
where it all starts: paraphrasing creeps in the door stealthily if you like and envelops
everything. Couple this with free exchange of opinions, analysis of material, drawing
conclusions from the same, activities like finding main ideas, discussing significance, future
repercussions and the like and the brain will come alive. Such activities will lead seamlessly
into summaries and essays, which will in turn pave the way for papers and dissertations.
There is no other activity which is better equipped to develop cognitive skills than the above.
The difference between students who have enjoyed such a diet and those who have not is
sadly obvious; I have come to think of the latter as mentally challenged in a completely new
sense of the word. One example I would like to give you is my daughter to whom essay
writing or the planning of essays has become second nature as she has been through the
French system. She described to me how comfortably she settled into graduate work at a
prestigious British university and how surprised she was on discovering how much certain
other students from various countries suffered. Thanks to her background, she is well versed
in various writing skills and has been planning essays since she was twelve. This being the
case, she fit in with the system in the UK, which relies heavily on the writing of papers and
dissertations, with no trouble; taking to it all with relish if you like. Classmates from radically
different backgrounds, as described earlier in this paper, had a lot of trouble: some
experienced panic attacks; others got deferments. It is tough to be thrown in at the deep end
so late in life and with this in mind, we, as an institution, have been trying to undo some of
the damage done in secondary education and rekindle those fires in the brain if you like,
whilst also teaching our students university level English, for many years now. Many of the
methods we employ are those also suggested in that brilliant study I quoted earlier in the

paper: Developing a Critical Response, Avoiding Plagiarism among University Students. It

is to the solutions to the problems described above that we shall now turn.
Possible solutions: what universities can do
The skills that students are encouraged to perfect throughout their school years and which
help them to sail over that last all important hurdle come university are not the ones that will
help them at university; at least, not in a lot of departments. Those slow application tasks and
all the cognitive skills that accompany them are still, thankfully, very much in demand. This
being the case the problem remains what to do with a student body that cant think; at least in
the traditional university sense of the word. The university I have the good fortune to have
been teaching at for the past thirty five years as well as certain other English medium
universities and one reputable French medium university has long seen it as its mission to
rectify this problem during the year of prep the students do to improve their English before
starting their departments proper. Our third aim is filling in, or trying to fill in, some of the
gaping holes in the students general knowledge. This is the challenge we, as a department,
face every year. We are not, by any means, alone: Galatasaray University, the reputable
French medium university I referred to, used, until very recently, to have two years of prep
before university proper; one year to improve proficiency in French, the second to fill the
gaping holes in students general knowledge. This second year was optional for graduates of
French schools who nevertheless opted, as a body, not to by pass it seeing it as vital for their
intellectual betterment. The two years of prep has recently been reduced to one as it meant
students had six years to get their degree; an unacceptable state of affairs it was felt.
The ultimate success of the efforts to make up lost ground depends, to a large extent, on the
background of the students and the extent of the damage done. The students who come from
the kind of home environment with less intellectual stimulation and who then continue their
education at the kind of establishment I described earlier usually have a lot more trouble with
the program, and failure rates among these students are comparatively higher. The degree of
authoritarianism in schools varies greatly in degree due to all the practical issues most
developing countries face such as student numbers, the limited number of good universities
and the importance of entering the latter to be able to significantly improve quality of life
but the fact remains that we do have a problem and are faced with an impossible dilemma. On
the one hand, the emphasis on testing seems unavoidable; on the other hand this system does
untold damage. The Ministry is trying to implement reforms and has made some progress but
they are also caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. A shift away from the rapid
response multiple choice tests and consequent drop in training for central exams translates
into higher failure rates on the said exams which measure none of the skills taught in class.
Despite this, some schools have started taking baby steps in the right direction with
predictable results as far as exam results go. In the study I quoted earlier, Developing a
Critical Response, Avoiding Plagiarism among Undergraduate Students, the authors state
that they, like us, discovered that the students displayed an inability to discuss the issues in a
critical manner and went on to explain their key findings as follows: Students appear to
merely summarize the plot or central story of the text without being able to identify the
central theme or issue that they wish to discuss. In addition, students also display an absence

of the skill to create relevance between secondary reading materials quoted and the issues
discussed. This has long been our view as well. The act of summarizing mentioned by the
authors is closer to a verbatim account of the text rather than a true summary in our case; the
latter is a skill we endeavor to teach them. The solution the authors of the same study
discovered worked is also the one we believe in. They write and I quote: We found that
pertinent analytical questions opened up an avenue for our undergraduate students to provide
insightful explication of the text. However, the process is slow and the students need to be
guided with meaningful clues. They still require probing and this is where the lecturer needs
to function as a facilitator towards engaging a more critical response in them. It is this last
issue, the fact that the process is slow, that is our biggest stumbling block: in our country the
law allows us a year to get the students through the prep year and the proficiency exam a
classic pen and paper affair which includes all the skills a university student needs. You
might be forgiven for asking why we persist in blocking the gaps in their general knowledge
and teaching them to think at all but the demands that university education place on the
student in most departments gives us no choice and quite frankly, I personally believe that
students end up developing and growing intellectually in one year, far more than they did in
their twelve years of education.