What if, on the SAT, you see the following question?

1. LOL :: :-D ==
a) OMG :: :-O
b) ROFLMAO :: :-(
c) WTF :: :-P
d) TTYL :: :-)
e) J/K :: :-X

Ridiculous? Sacrilege? Perhaps you'd be thinking about suing the CollegeBoard?

Well, it seems the Taiwanese equivalent of the SAT (學測) contained such NetSpeak Hilarity as part of the curriculum on the Chinese Language exam. And the consultant for question writing, a Liao Ji Lang (廖吉郎), Professor of Chinese at the Teacher's Preparatory University, acted rather unabashed about it.

The students were expected to understand something that we call 火星文 (Martian) in Chinese slang: a degeneration of the Chinese language used by people using IM clients and SMS text messages that "shortens typing time", just like the miscellaneous acronyms that popped up after the AOL Instant Messenger became popular in the teen crowd.

The controversial questions were part of a section of questions asking students to "spot the error". Most of the questions are fairly normal: asking students to remove redundancy and correct slang language (some examples of the errors are "氣到不行" [the last two characters form a slang for "to die"] and "被挨罵受罰" [the compound verb formed by the last four characters are already in passive sense by definition, so the leading character that converts an active verb to a passive verb is redundant and grammatically incorrect]). Admittedly, even the slang portion is questionable: outcry would happen in the US too if, on the PSAT's writing portion, in the "spot the error" section, the CollegeBoard decided to insert Ebonics or Creole; surely some "astutely educated" individuals from Connecticut suburbs would strongly disagree with the choice of questions.

But more exemplary of the problem arose when one of the errors was "幾乎快::>_<::了". The student was supposed to recognize that "::>_<::" was an emoticon for the action of crying. And for the instruction to the section, the student was told to correct "3Q得0rz" to "感謝得五體投地", where 3 is supposed to be pronounced as the Chinese "san" (as in the numeral), so 3Q becomes san-queue becomes "thank you". And 0rz is the "well known Asiatic NetSpeak for the action of kneeling to express inferiority", something adequately expression by the Chinese proverb quoted above. Sure, I could figure out from context (especially after having seen 0rz before) how the "incorrect phrase" is supposed to be a shorthand for the "correct phrase", but I doubt that someone completely unexposed to the internet "culture" can easily understand that set of instructions! What is a student to do in the face of unintelligible instructions?

Here's a Taiwanese high school Chinese teacher's take on this fiasco. It is already well known that the generations upon generations of college graduates in Taiwan have steeply declining abilities in what is supposed to be their mother tongue. For someone like me, who left the country after 8th grade, to possibly have better vocabulary, better understanding of the Chinese cultural history, and better articulation of the Chinese vernacular, than a typical high school (and possibly many college) graduates of Taiwan is very disconcerting to the future of the island's social-political, and economic stabilities. Given such power-hungry yet restraint-lacking individuals as the current president of Taiwan, who would make unprovoked statements to anger the Mainland Chinese for possibly just the fun of it, without a significant base of intelligentes to hold up the social structure and to keep the economy afloat, I really can't imagine a future (never mind a bright one) for that-place-in-which-I-was-born.

Yet more indicative of the problem is probably the following: after the parents, who learned of such ridiculous questions being asked on the comprehensive college exam, protested and demanded that those questions be discarded and not counted for credit, a band of students counter-protested, self-righteously I might add, demanding those question to be counted, on the grounds that they knew the answer, and that those who don't are obvious not "up with the times". And even more shocking is the following: after the dust settled a bit on the controversy, the College Examination Center released the statistic that "fewer than 5% of of people answered the "::>_<::" question incorrectly" while much larger percentage of the students did not catch the simple redundancy error in the passive sense that I cited as an example a few paragraphs back. The students are actually well aware of "proper" uses of NetSpeak, but can't discern an incorrect grammatical construction for a common, everyday, verb.

And the problem does not only manifest itself in Chinese. On the English exam, a student liberally replaced proper spelling of English vocabs with transliterations using the Chinese phonetic alphabet (a.k.a. BoPoMoFo). While the fact that he replaced the word "dog", something most 8-year-olds in Taiwan can spell, imply that he did it in jest, one can only wonder what happened to the sanctity of the exams that were supposed to determine a student's future.