C2 Reading Practice Test 3

Most of us hold, usually without noticing, a comfortable theory of memory: that it resembles a video archive, in which events are stored faithfully and retrieved on request. Remembering, on this view, is a matter of locating the right file and pressing play. The theory is intuitive, widely shared and, according to several generations of psychologists, substantially wrong. The case against it began with experiments conducted in the 1930s by Frederic Bartlett at the University of Cambridge. Bartlett asked English volunteers to read a Native American folk tale whose imagery and logic were unfamiliar to them, and then to retell it after various intervals, sometimes over a period of years. The versions that emerged were revealing. Details that seemed strange were quietly omitted or altered, the story became shorter and more conventional, and explanations that fitted the participants' own cultural expectations appeared where none had existed in the original. Memory, Bartlett concluded, is not a reproduction but a reconstruction, built each time from fragments and filled in with assumptions. Subsequent research has largely supported this view. Studies have shown that the wording of a question can influence what a person later claims to have seen, and that it is possible, under suggestive conditions, to lead people to remember events that never took place. Perhaps the most unsettling finding concerns confidence. The vividness of a memory, and the certainty with which it is held, turn out to be unreliable guides to its accuracy; a person may be entirely convinced of a recollection that is partly or wholly mistaken. These findings are not confined to laboratory curiosities; they have been replicated in many settings, from eyewitness testimony to ordinary personal reminiscence. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that memory is simply defective. The constructive process that produces occasional errors is the same one that allows us to imagine the future, to extract the gist of a conversation without recalling every word and to adapt past experience to new situations. A system that stored every detail with perfect fidelity would be, paradoxically, of less use; the few individuals who are reported to remember nearly everything often describe the ability as burdensome rather than enviable. The practical lessons are modest but valuable. Where accuracy matters, as in a legal setting, a notebook is more dependable than a conviction, and it is wise to treat our own certainty with a measure of humility. For students, there is an encouraging corollary: since each act of recall reshapes and strengthens a memory, testing oneself is generally a more effective way to learn than rereading. We are, in short, less like archivists than like storytellers, and the stories we tell ourselves are revised more often than we realise.

Few features of modern education provoke such strong reactions as the standardised test. To its defenders, it is a model of fairness: every pupil answers the same questions under the same conditions, and the results can be compared across classrooms, schools and even countries. To its critics, it is a blunt instrument that reduces a young person's education to a number. Both sides contend that they are protecting children, and each is at least partly right. Those who favour standardised testing begin with the argument from objectivity. A teacher's judgement, however conscientious, is inevitably coloured by familiarity, mood or unconscious bias, whereas an examination marked anonymously offers every candidate the same chance. Such tests also provide governments and parents with a view of how well schools are performing, which can expose inequalities that might otherwise remain hidden. If one district consistently produces weaker results than another, supporters say, society has both the evidence and the duty to ask why. Moreover, a shared yardstick allows talented pupils from modest backgrounds to demonstrate abilities that a teacher's impression or a family's connections might never have revealed. Without common measures, they warn, judgements about education would rest on reputation and rumour. Sceptics reply that what is easy to measure is not necessarily what is important. Creativity, collaboration, persistence and curiosity do not fit comfortably into a multiple-choice format, yet they may be the qualities that determine how people fare in later life. There is also the problem of "teaching to the test". When results determine a school's funding or a teacher's reputation, lessons tend to narrow towards whatever will be examined, and subjects such as art, music and sport are quietly squeezed out. The economist Charles Goodhart is associated with an observation, often paraphrased, that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Critics add that high-pressure examinations are a source of considerable anxiety, particularly among adolescents. The disagreement is rarely as stark as the slogans imply. Few people want a system without any assessment, and few believe a single score captures a person. Consequently, many education authorities are experimenting with compromises: sampling tests, which monitor the system without placing every pupil under pressure; portfolios of coursework alongside examinations; and feedback designed to help learners improve rather than simply rank them. What the debate ultimately reveals is a tension between two legitimate values, comparability and richness. A test can tell us, with reasonable reliability, whether a pupil can solve a particular kind of problem. It cannot tell us whether she will find a better one worth solving. The best systems are probably those that remember the difference.

For eleven weeks I had learned the part of Leontes in every spare minute I possessed. I had rehearsed it in the bath and on the bus, and once, memorably, in the queue at a supermarket, where an elderly gentleman had moved his trolley away from me with the polite haste of one who has recognised the symptoms of a particular kind of madness. The role, which is long, difficult and entirely unsuited to casual conversation, had colonised my brain. You will understand, then, that I was not exactly impartial about the health of Mr Aldous Pembridge, our leading actor. By all accounts, he had never missed a performance in thirty-one years. He gave the impression of a man who had negotiated personally with the common cold and obtained a permanent exemption. Every evening, at about the time the audience was settling in, I would stand in the wings in costume, in case of catastrophe, in the manner of a lifeboat on a perfectly calm sea. "Don't take it personally," the stage manager, Marguerite, told me during the first week. "Understudies are insurance. And nobody feels grateful to insurance until the house has burnt down." I did not take it personally, I told her, with great dignity. Privately, I imagined elaborate scenarios, all of them bloodless and none of them seriously unkind: a minor travel delay, a slightly disagreeable oyster. I imagined the moment when Marguerite would hurry towards me, whispering, "You're on." I imagined the hush in the auditorium and the review in the paper. On the final night of our run, the one performance that I had resolved not to attend at all, I stood in the wings as usual, if only because it seemed rude not to. Mr Pembridge, in tremendous voice, stormed onto the stage. I listened to him deliver the great speech in the second act, and something unexpected occurred. I found I was no longer waiting for him to falter. I was listening to the way he paused before the word "betrayed", a pause I had never thought to try myself, because I had always been too busy counting the lines until my own entrance. At the curtain call, the audience rose, and a few of them, I noticed with some surprise, were crying. Mr Pembridge caught sight of me in the wings and, while the applause was still thundering, raised one eyebrow in what I can only describe as a gesture of professional sympathy. "Eleven weeks," he said afterwards, coat over his arm. "Most people give up at about six." I never did play Leontes. But it is a curious fact that I can still recite the whole of the part, from the first syllable to the last, whereas Mr Pembridge, I am told, now grows tomatoes in Cornwall and cannot recall a line of it. If that is not justice, it is at least a good approximation of irony.