Point-to-Point: Entrance Examinations: Who Needs 'Em?

As a relative newcomer to university teaching in Japan,
I was very interested to read the article by Gary Buck (JALT
Journal 10 [1 & 2], 15-42) and the response from Vivien
Berry (JALT Journal 11 [1], 102-104). I read the articles at
an extremely apposite time as I was just in the early stages
of helping set the English entrance examination for my
university, and their articles helped to surface a number of
questions I had about what I was actually supposed to be
doing. Buck, implicitly and explicitly and Berry, very explicitly,
raised some extremely pertinent points about the
nature of entrance examinations, questions that had bemused
me in both the approach to and tradition of examination
setting in my university and, as far as I can see, most
other Japanese universities.