My first exam in class was actually much easier than I had thought. It was not in dictation form! Instead, for the first question the teacher would read a long sentence and then ask a question about that sentence to test our oral comprehension. Example: "The cat's in the house, the dog's out of the house. Where's the cat." We only need to know the Chinese characters to write the answer.
Other questions were even easier: in one exercise, we have to fill in one-word (one or two character) gaps in a text, which only requires reading skills and the ability to write those two characters. Other exercises include "make up a sentence from two given words" and multiple-choice among multiple sentences to indicate which one is grammatically correct. The funny bonus about all this, is that the text questionaire contains many, many Chinese characters, mostly used in the context of phrases. So if you possess general reading/guessing skills, you can find characters on the questionaire and then just copy those for your answers!
The way our classes are set up is that grammar and (oral/pinyin) vocabulary knowledge usually exceeds students ability to hand-write characters. Therefore, the entire questionaire is rather easy, provided you actually know how to hand-write the characters needed to answer. But you can copy them from the questionaire itself!
Just the day before the exam I had come to the conclusion that handwriting is a rather useless skill. This exam basically confirmed my belief. I will write more about this later. Now have to go to school!
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