"Unseen" ... Lost in Translation?

[Chung]

The more that I think about its use as a noun in language proficiency exams, it actually seems tautological. A test by definition must (should?) have exercises that uses passages which the test-taker has not seen before - to take it to its logical conclusion, a test is supposed to comprise only of such passages and questions. After all, what kind of test would it be if I were confronted with a test that matches problem sets or a practice test given previously, right down to the variables, given constraints, and/or preambles? (this is in contrast to asking a question in different ways as seen in interviews, interrogations or examinations).

In my student days, though, I would have loved it if all the tests that I had taken hadn't been full of "unseens"

I know the word from my studies in Latin and Ancient Greek, where most classes and exams alike consist of translating prepared texts. "Unseens" are used as one of several techniques to try to make the learning of a dead language a little bit more active.

Isn't that the way it should be for a text to be translated in an exam? Apart from testing my ability to regurgitate answers, what else would an examiner glean if I were asked to replicate effectively a translation of a text that I had done before?

[Mista]

The more that I think about its use as a noun in language proficiency exams, it actually seems tautological. A test by definition must (should?) have exercises that uses passages which the test-taker has not seen before - to take it to its logical conclusion, a test is supposed to comprise only of such passages and questions. After all, what kind of test would it be if I were confronted with a test that matches problem sets or a practice test given previously, right down to the variables, given constraints, and/or preambles? (this is in contrast to asking a question in different ways as seen in interviews, interrogations or examinations).

In my student days, though, I would have loved it if all the tests that I had taken hadn't been full of "unseens"

I know the word from my studies in Latin and Ancient Greek, where most classes and exams alike consist of translating prepared texts. "Unseens" are used as one of several techniques to try to make the learning of a dead language a little bit more active.

Isn't that the way it should be for a text to be translated in an exam? Apart from testing my ability to regurgitate answers, what else would an examiner glean if I were asked to replicate effectively a translation of a text that I had done before?

There is a lot that could be said and discussed about how the classic languages are taught and tested, so let me try to be brief here and stick to answering your question.

First of all, you can test both prepared and unprepared texts - and both are done. With unprepared texts, you would normally be allowed a dictionary, but with prepared texts, you would have to do without. But if you do get a text you have read before (or should have), and you have no aids like a dictionary or a grammar book to help you, you will, through your translation, betray: 1) if you have actually read the text before 2) how well you understood the text when you first read it with those aids (including any help from the teacher) 3) to what extent you remember the vocabulary, and 4) to what extent you know the grammar. In theory, you could memorize someone else's translation, but in that case, you would come to the exam and not know which part of the translation to write, so that wouldn't help you much. If you are a weak student, but have managed to get through the whole curriculum anyway, you will recognize the text and remeber the main content but reveal your lack of grammatical knowledge through small inconsistencies throughout the text, and holes in your vocabulary (translated inaccurately or wrongly or not at all).

One of the reasons why this type of exam is so common at the university, is probably that it's not only meant to test your knowledge of the language, but your knowledge of the text as well.

[Systematiker]

The more that I think about its use as a noun in language proficiency exams, it actually seems tautological. A test by definition must (should?) have exercises that uses passages which the test-taker has not seen before - to take it to its logical conclusion, a test is supposed to comprise only of such passages and questions. After all, what kind of test would it be if I were confronted with a test that matches problem sets or a practice test given previously, right down to the variables, given constraints, and/or preambles? (this is in contrast to asking a question in different ways as seen in interviews, interrogations or examinations).

In my student days, though, I would have loved it if all the tests that I had taken hadn't been full of "unseens"

I know the word from my studies in Latin and Ancient Greek, where most classes and exams alike consist of translating prepared texts. "Unseens" are used as one of several techniques to try to make the learning of a dead language a little bit more active.

Isn't that the way it should be for a text to be translated in an exam? Apart from testing my ability to regurgitate answers, what else would an examiner glean if I were asked to replicate effectively a translation of a text that I had done before?

You'd think, but if you've only got a specific subset that you're drawing from, you may have students who find it easier to review all the possible materials rather than have the ability to translate a previously unseen text. I can think of at least two people I know who did this for an examination in Biblical Hebrew (they memorized the gist of a bunch of hyperliteral translations). Or you may have students required to take a class but who have a great deal of familiarity with the possible texts in translation already (this was the case for many students of koine Greek in Germany, a lot of them knew the content of the NT by pericope from another exam prior to having to take [officially remedial] Greek).

[Chung]

I can see your points when it comes to ancient languages (especially since the respective corpora are much smaller than those of many living languages). Imagine though if the Goethe Institut's classes assigned homework with questions that were identical to its certification exams... As much as I would be happy to be asked effectively to replicate my answers from a homework assignment (as opposed to applying what I had learned from doing the homework), I would come out of the exam a bit jaded. None of the certification or proficiency exams that I have taken was a carbon-copy of (or lifted material verbatim from) term tests, pop quizzes or homework, which in my view is as it should be (notwithstanding your points about the constraints faced by those studying ancient languages). In a similar way, Hueber, Klett and Langenscheidt could make a lot more money on its preparatory exam kits if they were identical to the exams by TestDAF or Goethe Institut (and assuming that the latter two groups would be cool with their exams practically being on sale before the exam date).

[Speakeasy]

The discussion of "unseens" in testing causes me to recall this quote from Donald Rumsfeld: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Would not the unseens in testing be the "unseen unseens"; that is the seens we haven't seen or, possibly, the "unseeable seens" ?

[Iversen]

I have seen the word "unseen", but (as far as I remember) never about music. Here the international term is the italian "a prima vista", which means "at first glance". Which actually is quite logical: after all a musician sees the notes when (s)he plays "a prima vista" - and then they aren't unseen any longer.

[aokoye]

I have seen the word "unseen", but (as far as I remember) never about music. Here the international term is the italian "a prima vista", which means "at first glance". Which actually is quite logical: after all a musician sees the notes when (s)he plays "a prima vista" - and then they aren't unseen any longer.

Yeah here it's sight read. As in, "Good job guys, you sight read a lot of music today." - as was said at the end of my choir rehersal on Thursday of last week. I've used it/heard it used both in the context of playing music (on an instrument) and singing. Sight singing is also a phrase (which is not used for instrumentalist playing music) but I mainly hear/see it in the context of sight singing classes and voice auditions more than during a choir rehersal or voice lessons.

In German it looks like the term is vom Blatt lesen (or singen). I can't imagine there's an "international term" for sight singing in the same way there is for things like tempo markings (largo, andante, presto, and so on) and other markings in the score like da capo. Even then it isn't uncommon to find those markings in the composer's native language (though I mainly see those exceptions in German, English, and Spanish - mainly German). Of course that doesn't even touch non-western classical music which I don't know nearly as much about.

[Cainntear]

"Unseen" as a noun is almost certainly a Britishism (not to mention jargon). I've never encountered it used that way on this side of the pond either in any of the language classes that I've taken.

Not A Britishism.

If you look up the Abebooks list, books with "Unseens" in the title have been published on both sides of the pond. It's just an old, deprecated term.

The reason Mista has seen the term is presumably because classical language teaching is much slower to change than modern language teaching.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if "unseen" as a noun was originally a translation from Latin, where using adjectives as nouns is perfectly acceptable. A lot of older high register English was translations and borrowings from Latin even when the Latin conventions didn't really match natural English.

The more that I think about its use as a noun in language proficiency exams, it actually seems tautological. A test by definition must (should?) have exercises that uses passages which the test-taker has not seen before - to take it to its logical conclusion, a test is supposed to comprise only of such passages and questions.

That depends how many "seens" you have encountered in the course. Very few people would be able to memorise a whole book, so if you're told that one of the tasks will be to translate a page from a particular book, you are not going to be working from memory.

Working with previously seen passages is easier, but this is not a bad thing in an exam -- it means it's quicker, so you can test more in a given length of time.

Unseen passages also make marks less reliable, because A) you often can't guarantee that no-one has actually read the text before (particularly in the classics) B) Even if none of the examinees have seen it, it's very difficult to avoid introducing idioms that haven't been covered during the course, and then it's random luck which students have come across those particular idioms in their outside study.

That last point might seem OK on the grounds that a widely-read student will do better, and that's a common way of thinking in current language testing. However, I don't think that I have ever come across a paper for the Cambridge Advanced or Proficiency exams in which I could get 100%, because there are always idioms that I, as a native speaker, don't recall ever having encountered.

After all, what kind of test would it be if I were confronted with questions/assignments that matche problem sets or a practice test given previously, right down to the variables, given constraints, and/or preambles?

If the student can't predict that that particular question will come up, it's not as big a problem as you'd think. Performance on previously-seen problems does correspond fairly reliably with performance on unseen problems. But, that said, no-one would do this is a science/maths-type exam.

"Rehearsed question" as Cainntear puts it could be covered by what I view as material that would be presented similarly rather than identically although I think that a "seen" is the antonym of an "unseen". "Rehearsed question" doesn't that give quite that edge of being an antonym to "unseen [question]".

Formal logic is pretty useless in natural language. "seen" vs "unseen" is a binary system, a dichotomy, but there are useful distinctions that go beyond the dichotomy.

The point about "rehearsed questions" is that the students will practice them in class -- they are not simply allowed to; they are actively encouraged to.
If we used a binary antonym, we'd end up talking about "unrehearsed questions", which is ambiguous. Am I allowed to show my students that question, just not rehearse? In that situation you've got a slippery slope, and slowly teachers will start to find excuses for letting more and more rehearsal of so-called "unrehearsed" questions.

Or you could go with "seen" vs "unseen". Now you lose clarity on whether there is supposed to be any in-class practice or not. Some teachers will rehearse the questions, others won't.

The specific problem here is that some teachers will always bend the rules to help their students get better marks, whereas others believe that cheating is never justified, and undermines the whole system. The experience for students therefore varies widely between teachers, and the validity of the exam is compromised, as different people are essentially being tested on different skills (memory vs real-time processing).

So if we set a test with "rehearsed questions", we have questions that are seen and practiced. It's specific, and every teacher will show and practice the questions.

We have "unseen questions", and we know these have not been rehearsed, because the students have never been shown them.

In between the two is a possible category of "seen but not rehearsed", but this is no use, because we have no way of ensuring that students haven't rehearsed these questions with classmates or private tutors (therefore turning them into "rehearsed questions"

The biggest mistake we can make in testing is to look for binary categories based on simple antonyms -- humans don't work that way.