All Posts Tagged With: "exams"

Everything seems unfamiliar and un-memorizable

When I was studying for exams a little over a week ago, Christmas break seemed impossibly far away.

Normally, the more I study for an upcoming exam, the better I feel. As I read over my notes and review the textbook, the material seems familiar and my impending sense of doom diminishes a little.

But for my Embryology exam, the more I studied, the more I realized I didn’t know anything.

I forgot to bring my book. To the open book exam. To the only exam that actually counted.

There are all kinds of scenarios you see frequently where seemingly otherwise-normal people go completely insane: sporting riots, Black Friday, anytime free food is introduced into a newsroom. In the past, upon viewing these events, I would think to myself “Self, in such a situation, you would not succumb to the crazies. You would likely rise above the desire to go nuts about something that doesn’t matter.”

Then I went through first-year law school exams, upon which I learned that I am apparently completely the kind of person who goes batty when faced with things that mostly don’t matter and even more insane when faced with something that does.

At UVic, the 1Ls had six exams in a 12-day period: Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday for two weeks. Here’s the thing: Five of those exams didn’t count. Not technically, anyway. At UVic, the year-long courses all have midterms from which the grade will only count if it’s better than the grade you get on your final. These are dubbed “help, not hurt” exams, a moniker I take issue with having gone through the “help, not hurt” exam period.

I stopped exercising. I stopped eating. I didn’t consciously try to stop sleeping, but I did anyway. For two weeks, no matter what time I went to bed, I would wake up hourly, occasionally actually sitting bolt upright, with my brain a jumble of different law-related thoughts. Not even fully formed thoughts, either, so it’s not like these nocturnal interruptions were helpful. It was only ever just little, unconnected fragments of thoughts from all seven of my classes.

Offer, acceptance, consideration…Multiple Access v. McCutcheon…trespass torts…three doctrinal requirements to complete a gift…Oakes test…

Et cetera. On a loop. Every night for two weeks.

Of course, there was one exam that did count. Our Law, Legislation and Policy course was only half a year, so the December exam was the final, the one that one prof described as “just hurt.” And, of course, it was for that exam that I did the craziest thing I did in all of the two-week exam period, possibly ever.

I forgot to bring my book. To the open book exam. To the only exam that actually counted.

Considering my panic level at any given point in those two weeks was generally situated at around a 7, the discovery that I would have to write a three-hour final that actually counted without my coursebook (which, by the way, is where I made all my notes) almost caused a stroke. Which is a really great physical and mental place to be in, by the way, just before you write an exam.

The only good thing to say about this is that once my blood started flowing again and I emitted a sound not unlike a cat being strangled, literally everyone around me who figured out what had happened to me simultaneously reached with their one hand to their own book and with their other hand to their wallet to get out their copy card so that I could run to the library and copy as much of their book as I could before the exam. Seriously, there were like 8 different people performing the exact same motion, some of whom I don’t even really know. It was a balletic example of the kindness and generosity of UVic law students. It was actually really heartwarming.

Of course, it also didn’t change how screwed I was. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say it did not go well. Try and at least learn from me, anyone who is reading this, to check your backpack twice before leaving for an exam so that some good might come of this. And if you have any tips on how to better survive the next exam period — the one in April that actually all counts — please, for the love of Christmas, pass them on.

Promiscuity defined

When I was studying for my Evolution exam last week, I noticed something strange in the textbook: it referred to female prairie dogs as “promiscuous.” Seriously.

Apparently, by mating with multiple partners in a short period of time, they increase the chances of pregnancy. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that’s been in the making for millions of years.

The word “promiscuous” just seems like a weird way to describe the behavior. It’s just such a loaded word. Like the textbook is calling these prairie dogs skanks, or something.

-Photo courtesy of cliff1066™

Our student panel offers their advice

It’s that time of year again when across the country students are packing into gymnasiums and lecture halls to write their finals. Preparing for exams can be stressful, but if you plan it right, there shouldn’t be too much to worry about. We asked our student panel to tell us either their number one study tip or their best exam story. As with previous weeks, all videos will be posted to our You Tube channel.

Students put way too much pressure on themselves during exam season

There is no time of year where students are more neurotic, frustrated, and just absolutely miserable to be around than exam season.

Along with energy drink sales, one thing that seems to skyrocket around this time of year is the number of times the fire alarm goes off on my campus. On average, I’d say the alarm goes off once, or maybe twice a month at the University of Manitoba. Yet during exam season that number probably doubles, or even triples. During one of my exams last year, the alarm went off three times in a row.

I may not be able to prove this, but I doubt that the number of fires suddenly begins to increase on campus when the end of the semester rolls around. It’s more likely that the increase is the work of students, who feel like they haven’t learned anything all semester and are pulling the alarm in a desperate attempt to get out of their exam. Or, they have the sense of humor of a sixth grade kid, and thought it would be a hilarious prank. Apparently wasting your classmates’ time, and the time of the fire department, is side-splitting for some people.

Pulling the fire alarm has got to be the worst exam escape plan ever. It doesn’t even get you “out” of the exam. Unless the building is actually on fire and students are forced to go home, everyone shuffles back inside the exam room after the fire department has finished inspecting the building. The professor tacks on more minutes to the time you’re required to stay, and everyone finishes the exam as planned. All that’s accomplished by pulling the alarm is being forced to stay longer in the exam room, and severely pissing off your fellow students.

I realize the majority of students don’t see pulling the fire alarm as a viable alternative to writing their exam, but the notion that some students do serves as a testament to the amount of pressure students put on the outcome of their exams.

When those exams are worth 30, 40, even 50 percent of your grade, it can put a whole lot of weight on one test, and make pulling that little red leaver seem like not such a bad idea. Especially if you’ve got law school applications, grad school applications, or medical school applications riding on your GPA.

That being said, how much time does anyone spend thinking about their exam after they’ve finished writing it? For the average student, probably not a whole lot. It may feel like your entire future is weighing on the outcome of one little test, but in reality, it’s just a test. There are so many more worthwhile things to stress out over, and to pull the fire alarm for.

Saying goodbye can be tricky at this time of year.

Cape Breton may be the last place in the country where people unabashedly wish you a Merry Christmas at this time of year. Not Happy Holidays, I mean, but actual, full-throated, unironic, “Merry Christmas.”

I hear it a lot at the university because December exams (Christmas exams as we say at CBU, though they do not feel like a gift to the students or the faculty) because the end of the examination period quite clearly marks the last time we will see each other, at least until January, depending on the course. After ten years, it still makes me a bit uncomfortable.

When I was a student in Ontario, I made a point of not saying “Merry Christmas” to my professors because I usually did not know them well enough to presume that they did celebrate Christmas, and I did not want to cause offense. So I usually said, “have a good holiday” which worked for people celebrating Hannukah or Christmas or whatever, but could also be taken to meant the time off between semesters.

My students seem to have no such compunctions, and every time I hear them say “Merry Christmas,” I wonder if they have considered whether I might be, for instance, Jewish. And if I were, wouldn’t “Merry Christmas” be a bit insensitive? I’m pretty sure that they don’t think about that, and if they did, I’m pretty sure they would reply that they wouldn’t be offended by “Happy Hanukkah.” But that’s only because most of us here in Cape Breton are Christians or (like me) descended from those who were. “Happy Hanukkah” doesn’t bother us, because we have never felt marginalized by the domination of Hanukkah in December, or by the domination (and oppression) of Christian culture in general. I wonder how my Jewish colleagues feel about this.

And this is to say nothing of other groups who do not celebrate Christmas such as Muslims, and, perhaps surprisingly, some Christians. As it happens, I do celebrate Christmas as a winter festival, but it makes me uncomfortable when students assume that I do, because I feel like they are making me part of that in-group where it is assumed that everyone has the same values and traditions.

What should you say to your prof as you leave the exam room? Something friendly. “Have a nice break,” or “see you next semester,” or steal my “good holiday” line.

Just not “Merry Christmas.”

Honour system at U of S puts more responsibility on students to suck it up

Everyone always seems to fall ill at exam time. After three years of university, I now expect that a runny nose or headache will probably accompany me into my English final. Weeks of chronic stress and fatigue have to catch up with us sometime.

I presumed that a sick note was only for times when I physically could not get myself out of bed. Apparently this was not the case for students who were flooding the health clinic during exam season at the University of Saskatchewan. The university’s Student Health Centre stopped writing sick notes in early September and is instead encouraging instructors to accept self-declaration forms from students who were absent for medical reasons. Students will now have to go off-campus to obtain sick notes for professors who continue to require them, and the clinic will still write notes for its regular patients.

The clinic changed its policy after line ups during exam periods overwhelmed medical staff and sometimes forced them to turn people away who needed more pressing medical care. The clinic was writing almost 2,000 such notes a each year.

By encouraging the use of self-declaration, it may seem as if the U of S is creating an opening for wide spread absenteeism. However, traditional sick notes don’t really verify whether or not a student has a legitimate medical reason for being absent. It was difficult for physicians at the clinic to determine how incapacitated a student was in the single visit they would make to the clinic demanding a note. In some cases,  notes were handed out to students after they were no longer sick. The self-declaration forms actually puts more onus on students than sick notes do. Falsifying a form would be considered academic dishonesty.

Lynn Kuffner, U of S’s manager of student health and counselling pointed out to the Star Phoenix that in practice sick notes are not much different than a self-declaration form. “University is about academics, but it’s also about becoming a responsible adult,” she said. When the self-declaration forms were tested such as this past spring, the university found no difference in the number of absences compared to when sick notes were used.

Similarly, in January, the University of Alberta also replaced sick notes with a self-declaration policy, except that, unlike the U of S, the change is not optional for individual professors. “Physicians were often acting as a rubber stamp and saying, ‘the patient indicates this’ and signing it. So really, what is this doing that a patient couldn’t do in a signed declaration anyways? They’re just taking the student at their word,” Kevin Friese, Assistant Director of the U of A Health Centre, told the Gateway.

The University of British Columbia, University of Toronto and McMaster have also implemented comparable policies.

Part of the learning curve involved in becoming a responsible adult is figuring out how to deal with illness. Learning when it’s worth it to call in sick and when you should just suck it up and get through the day is part of becoming productive and successful. Self-declaration puts more responsibility on students to find that balance, as it doesn’t give students a doctor’s signature to hide behind.

A little knowledge is a hilarious thing.

One of the guilty pleasures of being a professor is laughing at students’ writing. We probably shouldn’t, but when so many papers induce wincing, and so many more induce snoring, it’s hard not to chuckle when the opportunity presents itself.

The best bloopers (including many of these reported at Inside Higher Ed) are those where a simple but crucial spelling mistake, malapropism, or badly structured sentence results in students asserting things that are still meaningful, but entirely different than what they must have intended. That is, if the student is just completely wrong, it’s not funny; it’s only funny if they are almost right and yet still completely wrong.

For example, Milton lost his vision and could not see when he composed Paradise Lost. This, then, is not funny:

Surprisingly, when Milton composed his greatest poem he was completely deaf.

But this is funny:

Surprisingly, when Milton composed his greatest poem he was completely blonde.

I just made that up, but the IHE piece gives a real-life example of Pettigrew’s Principle on bloopers:

In a drama examination, one student explained Adolphe Appia’s revolutionary contribution to scenography thus: “He moved projectors on to surfaces and shuddered at moments of climax.”

Ask anyone who has been teaching at university for a while, and they will give you more examples. I, for instance, often have students of Doctor Faustus tell me that Faustus sold his soul to satin, and Shakespeare students earnestly explain that Othello was tricked into believing in Desdemona’s quilt. Once, in a paper on Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Star” (in which a scientist’s religious faith is challenged when he proves The Star of Bethlehem was a supernova that destroyed a thriving civilization), a student suggested that the main character could not fathom why God “could not have chosen an uninhibited planet.”

Student bloopers not only provide much-needed moments of catharsis during long marking sessions, they also allow for professors to bond. You see, not only do your professors laugh at silly student errors, they share them with their colleagues. A psychologist down the hall once came to my office door and told me about a student defining “avoidance behaviour.” In class, the professor had explained that one argument against corporal punishment in schools is that the kids so punished simply stop coming to school altogether — avoiding the situation, not changing their behaviours. The student dutifully reproduced the example on  the exam: “Schools should not use capital punishment on students, or the students might stop coming.” Yeah, no kidding.

Profs share these unintentional howlers not to belittle the particular students — the code of the blooper says you must never give the student’s name — but rather to remind themselves that they are not alone. We all deal with the half-hearted and the half-witted. You think you have it bad? Just listen to this.

If it seems cruel that I, safely nestled behind my Ph.D. and my tenured position, am making light of those young strivers who are just trying to get through their classes, remember that I too was once an undergraduate struggling to show I knew what I was supposed to know and not always getting it right. Thus, as a first-year history student I wrote,

Napoleon’s soldiers returned from Russia a fraction of their former size.

If you are a student, feel free to have a good laugh at that. I have no doubt my prof did back then. And she probably showed it to the guy in the next office.

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Understanding academic probation, what it means and what to do about it

As exams wrap up across the country, most students are looking forward to patio nights and a stress-free summer. But some students are dreading their final grades after a not-so-perfect year.

A failed class, a flunked exam, or a mediocre grade-point average are outcomes no student wants to have come May. But what are the actual consequences of an ‘F’ on your transcript? Or missing required credits to move on to your next year or to graduate?

While most students may have heard of “academic probation,” not everyone knows what it entails. The first thing to remember is failing a class doesn’t mean you need to pack up your textbooks and join the circus, and getting put on academic probation won’t necessarily cripple you academically, if you seek help.

“The whole point of academic standings is to identify students who are at risk and then make them aware of the services that are available in obtaining better academic grades,” University of Calgary’s associate vice-provost (enrolment) and registrar David Johnston said. “When we admit a student, we want them to graduate.”

Academic probation is just one of many possible academic standings a full-time student can be assigned at the end of the year. In many cases the bad outweighs the good. At most schools, the only desired outcome is “In Good Standing,” which means you’re in the clear. There are varying degrees of unsatisfactory standings that come with conditions for the following school year, ranging from meeting benchmark grade-point averages, to withdrawing for a year.

In addition to “In Good Standing,” most universities include “Academic Probation” and “Failed” as the three possible standings. And the conditions of these standings are typically outlined in the university’s academic rules and regulations. Students receive notice of their standing in the summer, after grades are calculated through a mailed letter or an online transcript.

At a school like Calgary’s, when a student’s grade-point average is less than 1.70, the equivalent of a C-, students are put on a probationary period. This is typical of most schools, though the grade-point average threshold varies.

“The purpose, of course, of the first warning is to get them on track academically,” Johnston said. He said it’s normal for first-year students to come into university unprepared for the heavy course-load and higher academic standards than they are accustomed. First-year students, he said, are the largest group his school sees placed on academic probation.

Since grades are dealt with at the faculty level, it’s not clear exactly how many students each year are put on academic probation at each school.

It’s often just a matter of showing students their current learning styles aren’t working, associate dean of the faculty of science at the University of British Columbia Paul Harrison said. “Universities are pretty selective of who they invite in,” he said. “Students deep down have the skills if they apply themselves. Unfortunately some of them don’t.”

He said students also usually come out of high school with limited exposure to their chosen program or knowledge of the university’s expectations for them.

Manager of the Student Academic Success Centre at Carleton University, Kathleen Semanyk said besides academics, there could be any number of circumstances that prevent students from meeting program requirements. “We hear everything from ‘We’ve had a serious illness in my family,’ ‘I’ve lost a loved one,’ ‘I had to find a second job,’” Semanyk said. “It’s really common for students to think they’ve hit the end of the academic road.”

Johnston said, what also tends to happen is students may find their chosen program is not as well suited for them as they had hoped. “It’s aptitude and interest,” Johnston said. “If you don’t have an interest it’s hard to apply yourself.” Just the same, students may find their skill set doesn’t match what their program asks of them.

Gastrointeritis: symptoms may include a drastic lack of preparation for exams.

When a student goes to the doctor and complains of vomiting and stomach pains with no specific cause there’s a catch-all term that readily applies. Doctors call it gastrointeritis, a diagnosis that’s familiar to professors and instructors everywhere. So the doctor scribbles this word on a medical form of some description or other, and just like that the student has his or her “get out of exam free” card.

Students do occasionally become ill. And sometimes illness is badly timed and affects exams, midterms, and assorted deadlines. But this whole regime of medical notes is absurd and hypocritical and what’s more everyone knows it. The students who make a habit of such things know darn well they can get a note based on non-specific symptoms (i.e. “my tummy hurts”) any time they like. They even know which clinics to go to and how much they’ll charge. The doctors aren’t remotely qualified to evaluate any student’s ability to write an exam or complete an assignment while ill and still they’ll produce a note on the subject. And the administrators who require this exercise and the professors who receive the notes understand that 90 per cent or more of the claims are bogus, yet we continue to play the game by the agreed upon rules.

Again, the major problem here is the mistaken belief that doctors are qualified to judge whether or not a student is healthy enough to sit an exam. They are not. They receive no such training and any doctor will freely admit as much. When I was involved in Workplace Safety and Insurance work I had the opportunity to review a variety of documentation relating to injured workers and their ability to perform various tasks and jobs. Doctors who do this stuff for real are highly specialized and they spend a lot of time evaluating their patients before making a report. Even then their work is subject to doubt and controversy. It’s very subjective. So there is no way a family doctor, on the basis of a ten minute discussion, can genuinely report on a student’s ability to get his or her school work done. The diagnosis of gastrointeritis is nothing more than a repetition of the student’s claim about vomiting and stomach pain. There’s no possible test to verify these symptoms.

None of this is meant to suggest that I’m out to punish the poor “sick” students. Common wisdom accepts that students don’t really benefit from blowing off tests, from pushing deadlines, and from deferring exams. They get some relief in the short term, yes, but they only delay their problems. They do make more work for their instructors and that is kind of annoying at times. But they aren’t “cheating” in the sense that they gain anything. So the obvious solution is just to take students at their word and accept the stupid forms. I find myself doing it just as so many instructors have done so before. But it’s still a ridiculous exercise.

A very wise administrator once pointed out to me how truly stupid this all is by making this observation. The students who are genuinely sick don’t benefit significantly from seeing a doctor. The treatment for vomiting, stomach pains, and general flu-like symptoms (in other words, actual gastrointeritis) is just bed rest and fluids. Dragging yourself to a walk-in clinic and sitting around for a couple hours waiting for a note is just about the worst thing you can do. And on top of that, we’re just wasting doctors’ very valuable time with this pointless crap, by turning them into gatekeepers for an academic regime that needs to maintain the illusion of scrutiny. Surely their time could be better spent treating people who are actually ill.

For some this may come as news. If you never realized before how easy it is to get a doctor’s note, well, now you know. But it still isn’t in your interests to do it, so I wouldn’t recommend suddenly becoming “ill” the next time there’s a test. And for those who knew this already, you might as well be aware that we know it too. We know which doctors and clinics you are going to and we know exactly what you’re saying to them and we know how empty the process really is. We just don’t know what to do about it–aside from ensuring that the make up tests are harder than the originals and that no one (including the genuinely ill) ever derives any advantage from the process.

Sometimes, the system just doesn’t work very well for anyone. It makes my tummy hurt.

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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.