Wednesday, August 13, 2008

What a good exam

Today I did my first exam of this semester, and I am very pleased of how it went. There is a tradition on this course to give on exam questions which are not very solvable. Those who write the exams must of course make sure that the material that will appear in the exam is what was learned during the semester, but they always try to give tricky questions. Instead of making questions that just test your knowledge of the material, they give questions that require you to think about some trick.
However, this semester one of the lecturers on this course is new and he decided to break this tradition. I know about this because he told the class himself. Near the end of the semester he came to class and said that he will make sure that the questions in the final exam will be solvable, unlike what was in the previous years. He told that he looked on the exams from the previous years and concluded that even a person who knew all the course material might not be able to solve the questions. He later told us that the other lecturer and other people who have influence on the questions that will go into the exam, say that this is the course tradition to give such tricky questions.

The exam was today, and as it looks he won the fight (and my guess that it was indeed a fight). Some of the questions were more difficult than others, but overall the exam was very straightforward and even simple.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Friend,
Good. Hope the following ones work just as wall.
Amicalement, Anthony (Piuske)

Anatoly said...

Hello Anthony,
Thanks for commenting, great to hear from you.
I also hope the following exams will go well, the next semester definitely requires a lot of preparation...