(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

One exam down, two to go!

Apparently this exam was mostly written yesterday afternoon, which meant that for a few glorious hours/days, I was more prepared for the exam than the examiner. It is also very illustrative of what this class' lecture is like. (We had a rock discussion revision session yesterday, and he kept going "Now this rock would be great to use on the exam-- except now I can't." And then he admitted he hadn't finished writing the exam.)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

\o/

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They write a new exam every semester? At my school they have a few different variations of each exam at any given time--if one gets leaked they can pull it from the rotation without the system immediately collapsing; if something happens such that you have to re-take the exam having gotten far enough into the first exam to have seen it, they can send you a different one--and change them out every couple of years or so. My exam yesterday had a timestamp on the page corner: 01-2019.

Of course "semester" is not really a coherent concept across my school--I expect there's *some* students taking finals on any given week--so I suppose they *couldn't* do it that way even if they wanted to.

[wolffyluna]

Yep, new exam every semester! They'll often put up exams and answers from past years as a revision tool.

In general, my university has enough turn over in what content is in each class, and classes themselves, that if they had a rotation system, each exam would be used maybe twice, if they were lucky. And at the point its just easier to write a fresh one each semester.

(Though it does occaisionally lead to people having to write three exams for one semester: one for practice, one for people who can do it on the day, and extra for anyone who had to take the exam later.)

[contrarianarchon]

It's sacred policy at my uni that students will have 1-5 past exams to study from, which is good because they're patchy as hell about notes otherwise. I know one of my classes is supposed to only have 6 exams *anyway*, and that you can tell which one is up this year because they don't provide it to study from, which is why knowing older students is always a benefit when trying to study, isn't it.

(to be clear, I don't have anything more than rumor to go off for that, but I do intend to ask after it the next time I see someone who would have it. It's also a mildly surprising thing to learn, because I'd imagine that even basic for-dummies compsci classes like this one to move faster that that, but I suppose most of this stuff was old-hat when turing did it. It's really not a complicated class)