the exam beckons

After a less than wholly productive day of study, I’m off to sit an exam for a correspondence course on the Old Testament… I can’t say I’ve missed sitting exams.

Update: It was okay. At first reading, it was pretty frightening, but I managed to find four out of the eight questions that I could answer. The main thing that threw me was that the verses (you have to write half a page on context, meaning and significance of four out of six) didn’t have references, so you have to figure out what book of the bible they’re from, just from the text. I think I did okay.

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5 Comments

  1. relax,

    ull be fine,

    uve done enuf exams in ur time.

    my theory is if i leave early ive passed

    Mat. T

  2. is’t studying like riding a bike – you never forget how. i’ll be thinking of you anyway and hope all goes well. I’m sure you will be fine.

  3. I finished about half an hour early (for a 2.5 hour exam), so hopefully that’s a good sign. The exam technique came back to me, but my hand just wasn’t up to writing for 2 hours without complaining a lot… back to typing now – much happier.

  4. one of my subjects (2nd year psych) there was a comment on the forum that one student found this the most rigorous exam she had done (with 3 other degrees both undergrad and post grad behind her)

    she also made the comment that writing for 2 hours is a massively unnatural thing for most ppl now days. Is it realistic for lecturers to expect us to write more in the 2 hrs that we are in an exam than we have written collectively in the last month?

    Mat. T

  5. I think it’s all about tradition: this is how people have always been examined. Judging by the course notes for this particular subject, there haven’t been any changes to the course for the last 15 or more years, so why start now.

    Certainly there are computer-based exams in a lot of contexts, but they’re often highly involved multiple choice exams, which doesn’t necessarily test the kind of things that closed-book essay writing would test.

    There were a lot of protests back in the day from my fellow students about having to do a closed-book bible exam – “when would we ever be in a situation where we don’t have a bible?”. I tend to think it’s a good thing, though: often you can’t find what you’re looking for, and if there was just a bit more work put in ahead of time at memorising things, it would be easier to point out where something was.

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