PSLE Higher Chinese Paper 2: The Four Parts and How Marks Are Given

Higher Chinese Paper 2 shares a name with the Chinese Paper 2 but plays very differently. The Chinese paper is mostly multiple choice; in Higher Chinese only 10 of the 60 marks are chosen and the rest are written. Here are the four parts in question order, then how the marks work.

Cloze: five words out of eight

A narrative of a little over 200 characters has five blanks and a bank of eight words; each blank takes one word, answered by its number, and three words are left over. In our statistics, over 80% of bank words have two characters and around 15% are four-character expressions. When an answer is a four-character expression, the bank almost always holds a second one as a decoy, so filling in the first four-character word a child sees often goes wrong.

About a quarter of the decoys share a character with one of the answers, such as 掌握 and 把握, or 遵照 and 遵守. Two things separate them: details in the passage (a red face, shaking hands, a smile) and collocation (whether a word can take an object, or follow 越来越).

Method: read the whole passage first, fill the blanks you are surest of and cross those words off; with two or three blanks left, read each candidate back into the sentence and drop the ones that sound wrong.

Corrections: the child writes the answer

A passage of a little over 200 characters has five errors whose positions are marked: a wrong character in brackets, or an underlined word used wrongly (the instructions say only one character of that word is wrong). The child writes the corrected character or word. Every passage mixes the two kinds; most have three wrong characters and two misused words.

• About two thirds of the wrong characters sound the same as the right one, often with the same sound component, such as 脑 for 恼 or 墨 for 默.
• P6 papers have clearly more look-alike characters that sound different, such as 要 for 耍 or 渐 for 惭.
• In about 85% of misused words, the wrong word and the right one share a character, as in 珍贵 for 珍惜 or 坚持 for 保持. 珍贵 corrected to 珍惜 is the single most common pair in our statistics.

This part is handwritten in the exam. Typing practice is easier because a pinyin keyboard offers the same-sounding characters, so practise by hand as well.

Comprehension 1: six questions, 16 marks

A narrative of about 450 characters, usually with dialogue, built around one event and one turn. The order is nearly fixed:

1. Q11 and Q12: an everyday sentence with one underlined word; find the word in the passage with the same or a similar meaning. 2 marks each, and a wrongly written character scores nothing.
2. Q13 and Q14: a comparison table of a character's feelings, reactions or attitude at two points, with the reasons. 4 marks together.
3. Q15: a reason, or the meaning of a sentence, often in two parts. 4 marks.
4. Q16: choose the better of two titles and justify it with examples. 4 marks. One option is usually the surface event and the other the theme; the theme is almost always the answer.

Q16 is marked on cause, process and result, plus a final point for tying the choice back to the title. Retelling the story without explaining why the title captures its point loses the heaviest mark.

Comprehension 2: seven questions, 24 marks

A longer narrative, about 510 characters at P6, with more characters and a longer time span. The question types are also fairly fixed:

• Q17 and Q18: explain a phrase as used in the passage, 2 marks each. Not a dictionary meaning: say who, why, what it actually means, and the feeling. A common rule is that an answer without the actual meaning scores nothing.
• Q19 and Q20: find information, give reasons, or compare a before and after. 3 to 4 marks.
• Q21: summarise one paragraph in at most 15 characters, 4 marks, marked on who, what they did and the result, with a deduction for going over. About 80% of papers in our statistics set the limit at 15.
• Q22: an inference, such as what kind of person a character is or what shows it. 4 marks, often in two parts.
• Q23: give an opinion and support it with an example from daily life, 4 or 5 marks; at P6 most often 2 plus 3. Without a stated position, the example part scores nothing.

What point-by-point marking means

Comprehension answers are marked by meaning points, in steps of half a mark. A 2-mark comparison is often 1 mark for the feeling and 1 for the reason; a 4-mark title question is 1 for the right choice, 2 for cause, process and result in half-mark points, and 1 for tying it to the title. Wording different from the model answer is fine if the points are there; a long answer that misses the points earns nothing extra.

SEAB does not publish a marking scheme for Higher Chinese. These are patterns we drew from our own exam-point data for practice, and may not match PSLE marking exactly. With no published cut-offs, no practice score can be converted to D, M or P.

Try one on AceLah

AceLah's Higher Chinese Paper 2 sample follows this format: one cloze, one corrections passage and two comprehensions, 23 questions and 60 marks. Questions 1 to 12 are marked on submission (for corrections, the single character or the whole word both count); for the open questions your child sees a model answer and ticks off the marking points to arrive at an estimate. Free, no sign-up, with a printable version for handwriting.