The educational system in one image.

If my grandfather knew how badly my hand has cramped up after a measly two-hour exam, he would give me such a hiding. I am so unused to writing anything longer than a post-it note to myself that I’m starting to hear the voice of that cranky old man giving me a right talking to about how useless the lazy young whipper-snappers of today are. In his day, they could write entire novels in a standard school day and still go home and take dictation from their fathers.

Do you want to hear a funny story? So I have three exams this exam period. As far as I knew, I had one exam this afternoon for Health Economics, which was an open book exam (the one I was least concerned about), one exam next Tuesday for Macroeconomics (not thrilled about), and a closed book exam next Wednesday for Health Economics and Policy (also not terribly excited about). Yes, I can hear you already, Health Economics and Health Economics and Policy are two very similarly-named classes. So this morning I was getting ready for my open book Health Economics exam, not really giving any cares, when I decided to double check that I had the exam time and room correct.

So I go to the student website, download the Examination Timetable .pdf, and type in the course code for Health Economics. “That’s funny,” I say to myself “Why is it showing up as being on the 16th?” And then I get that sinking feeling where I know I’ve made a big mistake. I typed in the course code for Health Economics and Policy, the class that has the closed book exam on what I thought was next Wednesday. When is the exam? It’s in three hours. Three hours away, at a time when I was expecting to have a fairly breezy open book exam. Pretty hilarious. 

In hindsight, now that I’m clear of my crazy cram session and surprisingly successful short essay exam (or so I think - we’ll see when I get my marks back), I think I really did this the correct way around, tricking myself like this. You see, now I have one less exam to study for. Bright side! There it is!

In other news, how amazing (and incredibly impractical, I know) would it be if you could choose your own type of assessment? Freeze up in exams? No problem, write a research essay instead. Hate giving oral presentations but love multiple choice and short answer questions? Done. If you could just select a certain combination of assessment that you felt comfortable with, but still added up to the required assessment load of the course, how much better would university be? I suppose you could argue that the way things currently work means that you can develop your oral presentation skills, but let me tell you, I almost have two degrees, and I am still no more confident speaking to a small group of my peers than I was when I was in high school. 

(Source: vitundarvakning)