Some semesters ago, we had two excellent Chinese guest students at our university who passed all exams with high scores except one, in which both failed. The significant difference between the failed exam and the perfectly managed others was that in this failed one, the students were asked to take a critical position against the taught contents. If we had foreseen their culturally specific reaction, we could have prepared them regarding our both countries' different concepts of learning (critical examination vs. reproduction) and understanding of respect towards instructors (consulting/guiding instructor vs. person of authority): In this particular exam, the students refused answering because they feared to offend their lecturer when criticizing him or his choice of contents. After a short discussion of the theoretical background of this paper, we will come back to the issue of this example.
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