Four days ago, I started intensive preparations for an impending exams (PHY 202 Electricity and Magnetism). Today I am seated behind the PC with a lot of doubt as to how well I will perform. I will describe this course's exams as by far the most difficult by all standards. Weird and silly questions were what my PhD lecturers put down on the question paper for me to answer.
I must exaggerate, for the first one and half hours out of a total of two hours, I was reading and reading and reading over and over again the same questions I know I will not be able to answer. When eventually I got the guts to do something, I realised my guts were not guts enough.
Who brought and which people accepted examinations as a way of testing the understanding of a student. Must an examinee pay for forgetting what he/she has learnt in the exams room because he/she will surely forget it after some days.
At the beginning of the semester we were handed out photocopies of textbooks(because we could not afford the original textbooks) as a student bible for the four months course. I never paused a while to consider how much work I was supposed to put into chewing and pouring informations from a book of about 1000 pages (not really but close).
For my friends who bothered the least about this paper they will by now have forgotten of it and me , I need God's intervention. So who is intelligent or studious when the results come out and we all perform the same. Or even when I perform worse than they did.
Examinations are foolish. It is not the case that probably I do not know how to learn because I have aquired the skill of passing exams and I have adequately prepared for this paper so why could I not answer those damn 'stupid' questions.
I have no other place to find solace than to blame my lecturers ( yes three of them) for bringing up questions that Master students will need tutorials for and expect a poor undergraduate like me with a relatively weaker brain to solve. If the examiners cannot set questions to the standards of the examinees, then whats the essence of the exams if you will teach me one thing and bring question from planet Mars.
Truly and indeed examinations are foolish.
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