I’ll just go ahead and say it. Maybe it’s a deficiency of cultural understanding or an ethnocentric perspective, but I DON’T see the logic behind exams in the UK.

Rather than the model America follows of smaller tests periodically, my modules (or classes) here have only one test at the end. 60% of my grade depends on how I do on this one test, the other 40% being dependent on a paper I had to write a few weeks prior. It’s 5 months worth of reading, studying, attending lectures, etc, all condensed to one single grade entry.

That’s a lot of pressure.

Adding to it is the fact that the examination period is two to three weeks long and follows the holiday break. The assumption is that the holiday break gives you ample time to study and that you won’t spend that time gallivanting willy-nilly all over Europe as a silly tourist. My mistake.

One last criticism of the exam scheme is that you are amassed with 400 other students taking various exams. One of my classes only had an average attendance of 8 people. It seems like it would have been a much more relaxed atmosphere to take the exam in our normal room with only those 8, rather than lined up in the gymnasiums internment camp style with 392 others. As an educator and American this kind of evaluation just didn’t add up to me.

There wasn’t much I could do though but to suck it up and play by their rules. We were told before taking the exam that we should memorize quotes we felt might help us. We were also told to memorize the page and line numbers if they were coming from a poem. So there I was, mere days before the exam, memorizing Italian passages to help me possibly write about Vigil’s Aneid. Do I speak or know Italian? Well no, but I knew that it’d certainly look good on the exam. So I committed to memory: dates, names, places, quotes, and foreign languages even, all for potential use on this one test.

The morning of my first exam (Reading Culture) had some of the most terrible weather I’ve seen so far this year. We, who were heading to the gymnasium, death-marched in silent rows of two, soaked to the bone. I probably should have brought an umbrella but that was the last thing on my mind. As I looked around the grim faces of my fellow students I could see that they were probably thinking the same thing.

We lined up outside the doors and found our names and a corresponding seat number. Once inside we were practically strip-searched for contraband, (contraband being; notes, mobile phones, PDA’s, dictionaries, etc), and were explained the rules. The rules for my class were simple; I had two hours to write two essays answering all the questions listed on a prepared sheet on my desk.

The clock started and like a shot I was off. I don’t mean to sound condescending or that I have an inflated sense of my own ego, but I killed that exam. From scratch I wrote one of the best essays I’ve ever turned in. It had wit, quotes, and a creative yet thoroughly developed argument. In fact when I finished I didn’t want to turn it in, I wanted to frame it and put it up on my wall. Or at least I thought it was good. I used a non-traditional argument so perhaps my professor won’t agree with it.

Regardless the first exam left me feeling great and gave me the much-needed confidence to meet all further exams head on. I had finished all of mine for this semester within the first week and therefore had the second week off to prepare for my next semester. All in all, after so much dread and anticipation attached to the exams before I took them, it turned out to be a good thing. Take that Queen Elizabeth!

Admittedly I will be preparing much sooner for next semester’s exams….