Girl's DayYesterday was almost my last day of duties at UMDS. Having been here 15 years, it has been a long time coming. It still feels as if I'm living out of a suitcase, as if I don't truly belong, so it's not really a big deal to be moving on.
The last day was spent in six hours of entrance exams. UMDS is struggling – badly. Fifteen years ago we got about 15,000 applicants for less than 1,000 places. With entrance exam fees going at ¥35,000 a time, that's a very nice little earner. Or at least it was. Yesterday, there were only just over 100 people taking the exam. Overall, UMDS is getting only about 1,000 applicants a year in four lots of exams, so entrance exams no longer bring in the money. The school refuses to believe this, though, and year in year out we must make ever greater efforts to attract more applicants to the exam. A futile, stupid, money and time wasting exercise when there's many other ways to generate income, especially for a school with such great potential in many areas.
Over the years, UMDS has made a lot of mistakes with entrance exams too. The worst was when it gave the same papers two weeks running. I was actually the professor who broke that particular scandal – and scandal it is in Japan, something that certainly hits the press! There we were, calmly watching the sweating examinees when a girl put her hand up and I went over.
"I did the same exam the other day," she said.
"Oh?" I said, "Hold on, I'll ask about it."
She turned out to be right. About 50% of the papers given out across several hundred examinees that day where copies of the earlier one. We had to stop the test entirely and re-start it with the correct papers. Problem was, half of the people got the correct paper first time. A total mess. Perhaps it's not surprising that UMDS is in such a deep mess when, as a business school, it can't organize such things despite thousands of man-hours of checking and re-checking by bored, under empowered admin and faculty, none of whom want or dare to take initiative.
Even yesterday brought something new, though. The second paper was English – or at least the strange, English-like language examined at these times. Before the exam, our team leader, himself an English teacher, was joking about some of the examinees wearing sweat shirts with English on them and how they could be used to cheat. At least I thought he was joking. Once we got to the room he made two people turn their sweat shirts inside-out before the paper started! Partly to see just how serious he was prepared to be, I pointed out that at least five others had some form of English on their clothing. One had "Freaky Massive" on his shirt, for example. Sure enough, all five had to either remove their sweaters of reverse them before the exam started.
Such is Japan. I'm sure it'll get even more weird once I get to Tokyo!
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