Hi, I have just went through the SSI Dive Guide classroom exam.
As we are in Argentina, all the material comes in spanish, including student's manual, DVDs, and exams.
Reading the student's manual in spanish was really a hard work. The translation from what should be the original english text is a shame. Too many errors, phrases with hardly any sense, poor use of plurals, reflexive and pasive verbs, repetition of words, and a long list of etceteras.
With patience the text book is readable.
The real problem was today.
The classroom exam is 50 questions with multiple choice. The minimum required is 80%, this means 40 questions answered ok.
The answer page has the 50 questions and the up to 4 possible answers marked with a circle that has to be filled with the pencil or ball-pen.
The correction is a template with holes in the circle that has the correct answer that is overlapped to the answers page, so no guess about the contents of the question and the answer.
Here comes one of the problems. The questions and the possible answers are all in that horrible translated from english spanish. This means that the question has a questionable meaning and the answers hardly describe the answer, so if I cannot understand the question and I cannot understand the answers or the answers are so poorly translated that have a different meaning, how can I choose which one is the correct ?
The second problem, which is even worse is that questions that can be understood, with choices of answers that can also be understood are not correctly marked as right in the template.
Suppose that if everything was correctly translated, 3 to 5 questions can be wrongly answered by the mean student.
Add to this that up to 10 questions are questionable owing to the poor translation, the result would be 38 questions answered OK => 76 % => not approved. This was my result.
We had a revision or a second chance to re-answer (for me) the 12 wrongly answered questions.
I could re-think and re-answer those 5 first questions, but those other 10 we had a long discussion with the Instructor, reading the text book and showing her that the template was wrong. She had a procedure and she had to follow it.
I hope that the Instructor could argue with SSI all this things.
This is not the single case.
I read here in SB many complains about the Science of Diving text book, revisions and errors, sum to this a poor translation done with a tool (google translate ???) and a very light revision of the translation done by that tool.
I do love google translate, but a revision is always required.
SSI talks in every text book about "Total", Total Logbook system, Total Thermal protection system, Total this and that. It should be time to have a Total Translation System with the so many times mentioned quality.
I hope that SSI could review this problem.
As we are in Argentina, all the material comes in spanish, including student's manual, DVDs, and exams.
Reading the student's manual in spanish was really a hard work. The translation from what should be the original english text is a shame. Too many errors, phrases with hardly any sense, poor use of plurals, reflexive and pasive verbs, repetition of words, and a long list of etceteras.
With patience the text book is readable.
The real problem was today.
The classroom exam is 50 questions with multiple choice. The minimum required is 80%, this means 40 questions answered ok.
The answer page has the 50 questions and the up to 4 possible answers marked with a circle that has to be filled with the pencil or ball-pen.
The correction is a template with holes in the circle that has the correct answer that is overlapped to the answers page, so no guess about the contents of the question and the answer.
Here comes one of the problems. The questions and the possible answers are all in that horrible translated from english spanish. This means that the question has a questionable meaning and the answers hardly describe the answer, so if I cannot understand the question and I cannot understand the answers or the answers are so poorly translated that have a different meaning, how can I choose which one is the correct ?
The second problem, which is even worse is that questions that can be understood, with choices of answers that can also be understood are not correctly marked as right in the template.
Suppose that if everything was correctly translated, 3 to 5 questions can be wrongly answered by the mean student.
Add to this that up to 10 questions are questionable owing to the poor translation, the result would be 38 questions answered OK => 76 % => not approved. This was my result.
We had a revision or a second chance to re-answer (for me) the 12 wrongly answered questions.
I could re-think and re-answer those 5 first questions, but those other 10 we had a long discussion with the Instructor, reading the text book and showing her that the template was wrong. She had a procedure and she had to follow it.
I hope that the Instructor could argue with SSI all this things.
This is not the single case.
I read here in SB many complains about the Science of Diving text book, revisions and errors, sum to this a poor translation done with a tool (google translate ???) and a very light revision of the translation done by that tool.
I do love google translate, but a revision is always required.
SSI talks in every text book about "Total", Total Logbook system, Total Thermal protection system, Total this and that. It should be time to have a Total Translation System with the so many times mentioned quality.
I hope that SSI could review this problem.
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