Final Marks

July 20, 2007


After all those countless hours of work during the term, after all the textbook-reading, paper-writing, midterm-cramming and memorizing. After all that work, isn't it devistating to know that your final mark hinges on 2.5 hours of writing the final exam.

I hate this system. For some reason, I can know all the information I need to know, but once I get into the test-writing situation, it's like it all disappears. But sometimes, I won't even know this. I'll be writing my exam, thinking that things are going well, I'm answering the questions correctly, then when my final mark comes out, it's like a slap in the face.

Oh, another issue is that your mark is also determined by who your prof is. Sometimes you'll get an easy prof and you'll end up with a high mark. But you could take the exact same course another term, with a different prof and be on the brink of failure.

Which brings me to the thing that's been bothering me all term. One of my psych profs is non-existant. In fact, I don't even know who he is. He has TAs running the discussion boards and the tests aren't even written by him. The tests are a joke. They are multiple choice questions provided by the publishers of the textbook. They are questions based on one sentence in the textbook, so specific that only someone who had the textbook in front of them would know the answer. And after you do the test, it is marked automatically by the system (again, no work for the prof here!), and you don't even get to see which questions you get wrong. I'm not even learning anything from this course because of how crappily it's been set up.

Based on those two criteria of estimating my final mark, it looks like I'll be failing this course. Great.

(Note: The textbook in the picture is not from the course I'm disappointed with.)

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