The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

and cultural life that mere read- ing wouldn’t cover. In sum, the students, teachers and administrators do the best they can in an extremely crowd- ed, stressful environment. Still, I wish the atmosphere in the school were more humane and relaxed, and hope that plans for larger classrooms might be in the offing. Louisa W. Peat O’Neil Embassy Mexico City u Overcoming Butterflies I have taken many courses at FSI over a 30-year Foreign Service career but the best one was a course in public speaking that I took many years ago. At the first session, each participant had to get up and introduce himself. At the second session, we had to introduce another member of the class. And so it went, with each session requiring a more demanding “speech,” until the final session when we had to speak on something con- troversial. I spoke on why we should recognize Communist China, which was heresy at the time, and the instructor complimented me on my courage in choosing such a controversial subject. Before taking that course I would get butterflies in my belly whenev- er I had to get up and speak, but now I rise and shine, and without the butterflies. What I missed at FSI was a course on negotiating, something that all FSOs have to do at some time in their work. It should be a part of every officer’s training. Yale Richmond FSO, retired Washington, D.C. u The Case for Outside Examiners As a former language educator, language student at FSI, observer of other FSI language programs, and FSI examinee in four languages, I have been struck by one overriding fact: the unevenness of FSI’s language offer- ings. Some unevenness is to be expected, of course, in an institute that provides instruction in such a wide range of languages, with their inherent differences in difficulty, and that must recruit instructors from such a wide variety of back- grounds. The single most dis- tressing example of this variabili- ty, however, occurs in the one area that is supposed to level the playing field across all languages: the scoring system. From personal experience, my own scores in various lan- guages, which in some cases are very similar, do not correspond either to my own real facility or even how I tested on a given day. I have heard many similar stories. Sometimes the scores are too high, sometimes too low; sometimes students from FSI’s own programs seem to be disadvantaged, and sometimes (seemingly more often) advantaged. I would advocate one simple reform that, while not magically resolving all the issues out there, would go a long way toward both establishing a more reliable scor- ing system and introducing incentives for long-term improvements in instruction: scoring by outside exam- iners. The current system of using FSI instructors to eval- uate FSI students contains too many built-in conflicts of interest. The protocols for the testing themselves con- trol these factors to some extent, but will never elimi- nate them. Using outside examiners would immediate- ly introduce a distance between examiner and exami- nee, and thereby a degree of objectivity, that would improve both the reliability of scores and people’s per- ception of that reliability. One of the biggest complaints heard from language-designated posts is that an FSI score does not always predict what an individual will actually be able to do on the ground. Furthermore, having a more objective examination program will force both instructors and students to focus on actual language acquisition. Instructors will want their students to succeed, because other native speakers will be judging the outcome of their teaching; and students will want to succeed, because they know that they will not be able to rely on known quantities to give them the benefit of the doubt at the test. These incentives will encourage language programs to adopt strategies that work for both teachers and students. F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 The single most distressing example of unevenness, however, occurs in the one area that is supposed to level the playing field across all languages: the scoring system.