A curious observation regarding my HSK6 Standard Course Workbook marks

[becky82]

To prepare for the HSK6 (again), I began revising the HSK6 Standard Course textbooks, spending around 8 hours studying in depth each chapter (making YouTube videos while doing so).  After finishing chapter 13 (out of 40), I felt I wasn't learning much (I already knew most of the words) and it was rather time-consuming, so I stopped.  Then I started doing the HSK6 Standard Course Workbook exercises instead; these are the marks I got per chapter (there are 36 questions in each chapter, ignoring the writing section):

 

1. 83% 2. 75% 3. 75% 4. 83% 5. 89% 6. 86% 7. 78% 8. 89% 9. 95% 10. 86% 11. 92% 12. 95% 13. 75% 14: 56%

 

I was feeling confident after section 12 when I got my second 95% (on the 5th March, 2024), but then my marks took a tremendous dive at chapter 14 where I got 56% (on the 7th March, i.e., two days later).

 

I'm feeling like this is not a coincidence.

 

(As a side note, two years ago, I thought the HSK6 Standard Course Workbook was too hard, rating it "Difficulty: 9/10".)

[cncorrect]

I had the same issue when I took an English test. I think there are two reasons for this. First, we may have weakness in our language skills. Second, we still need to adjust our test strategy. 

[becky82]

Okay, so I finished studying the HSK6 Standard Course Workbook just now, and these were my marks for each chapter (total marks out of 36 in the listening and reading sections as a percentage):

 

上: 1. 83% 2. 75% 3. 75% 4. 83% 5. 89% 6. 86% 7. 78% 8. 89% 9. 95% 10. 86% 11. 92% 12. 95% 13. 75% 14: 56% 15: 75% 16: 72%  17: 83% 18: 75% 19: 89% 20: 83%

 

下: 21. 72% 22. 78% 23. 67% 24. 69% 25. 72% 26. 78% 27. 75% 28. 64% 29. 67% 30. 78% 31. 83% 32. 81% 33. 69% 34: 58% 35: 81% 36: 69%  37: 75% 38: 86% 39: 83% 40: 94%

 

There's a mock exam at the end: listening 78%, reading 88%.  I did the writing sections too, but they were unmarked.  (I don't recall where, but I've encountered parts of the mock exam elsewhere.)  I usually found I mis-handwrote two or three characters, and made some poor word choices and clunky grammar choices, but there's not much I can do to improve this without additional years of practice.

 

I originally ascribed my poor performance in chapter 14 (despite reasonable/good performance in chapters 1 through 13) to not having studied the HSK6 Standard Course chapter 14 in enough detail.  This motivated me to finish the remaining chapters of the HSK6 Standard Course (chapters 14 through 40, which literally took months), after which I completed the remaining chapters of the HSK6 Standard Course Workbook.  But now I think I was mistaken; I did badly in chapter 34 too, despite having previously studied chapter 34 in detail.  So I no longer think my poor performance in chapter 14 (Workbook) was due to not having fully studied chapter 14 in the textbook.

 

I feel there are some questions in the HSK6 Standard Course Workbook that are simply bad questions, like this one, where it's just not reasonable to expect a HSK6 student to be able to differentiate this level of nuance, especially when it involves non-HSK words.  Or like ch.26 q.34 where the correct answer is 本质上是个孝顺的孩子, after he spends the majority of the text getting annoyed at his mother.  Or like ch.25 q.11 where the audio says 医生有点不耐烦，态度有点冷淡 (and then the doctor insults the patient's manhood because he complained about the pain) so you might (like me) choose A 他今天心情不好, but the "correct" answer is D 他相信女护士处理更合适, so the doctor somehow believed the nurse would do a better job, despite the nurse saying 那医生是我们医院最好的，……，我是新手.

 

I don't mind getting answers wrong if I learn something, but sometimes the you get answers wrong because the author likes to set traps, or personally prefers one phrasing over another.  I particularly dislike the 标题 questions, which are subjective but marked as right/wrong.

 

The other frustrating thing with this Workbook is that there are no justifications given for the answers.  I want to understand the thought process used to arrive at the correct answer, so that I can use the same thought process in future questions, but the Workbook doesn't provide it.  The underlying logic for the questions I struggle with is usually not obvious, so if I ask native speakers or Chinese teachers I'll get a bunch of inconsistent explanations.  However, the listening section has a transcript, which is helpful.  Other textbooks (like HSK6级攻略 by 刘云) provide explanations as to how you're meant to deduce the correct answer.

 

Another thing with the questions in the Workbook, is that you're meant to exclude options because they go unmentioned in the audio/text (not because its negated in the audio/text).  To give you an idea of what I mean, suppose one of the four options to choose from is "John likes music", and you listen to the audio from start to finish and the topic is not mentioned (it doesn't say "John likes music"; it also doesn't say "John doesn't likes music").  In this case you're meant to exclude this option.  In fact, sometimes the options are true statements (e.g., for science topics), but they're not the correct answer to the question because it's not what the audio/text says.  This certainly ratchets up the difficulty: you need to listen carefully from start to finish, and understand that nothing said implies "John likes music".

[liqi]

Not HSK6 related, but I'm using the HSK5 workbook and had pretty much the same observations. Not only do the chapters almost always have no relation to the corresponding textbook chapter, but the difficulty is all over the place: some chapters are dead easy and some you want to 自杀. I don't think there are many tricky questions, but it's definitely harder than the actual exams I've saw on hskmock and the 真题集 2018 book. Lots of questions with bullshit reasoning though. Workbook aside, the textbook is simply awful. Grammar explanations are almost always one-liners without much helpful info and for vocabulary they just provide you with a rough english translation with no context or usage whatsoever (aside from the text is, which is quite useless as a lot of words tends to have a lot of overlap at this level. They exclusively explain and expect us to understand grammar points in chinese but apparently vocabulary in chinese is too much 😛

 

I suppose the book does it's work, but oof, rough quality for something official. I'm honestly just mining the words I don't know from each chapter, hope it works so I don't have to retake the exam and do it the proper way 🤧