Christmas Exams

One of the great things about university is that the semesters are much shorter. Instead of having your exams at the end of January, you have them a month earlier. It is much better this way, I think, because you don’t have to worry about forgetting information over the holidays. You also don’t have any assignments to work on, so you can simply take two weeks and reward yourself from working so hard.

In every exam, the level of difficulty only depends on one person. That person is not the professor. It is you. The work you do throughout the semester, the time you spend studying, and the number of classes you actually attend are directly related to how difficult you perceive an exam to be. In other words, you’ll either come out of an exam traumatized and in mental agony or you’ll come out feeling successful and maybe even insulted at the easiness of the exam.

First year university students are particularly worried about their Christmas exams. They represent the first major assessment of your post-secondary career. Unlike in highschool where guidelines dictated the question types on exams, the faculties are free to design the exam however they choose. One of my professors chose a three hour multiple choice exam with content from the entire semester. There are about 300 questions! Many first year courses involve multiple choice exams because they can use machines to mark the answers- thus save time and money.

It may surprise you to hear that there are also open book and take home exams at universities. Most people consider these to be easy and don’t study for them. This is the biggest mistake you can make. You need to go over your texts and highlight and mark important pages for open book exams. If a teacher asks some specific details about a certain subject in a 1000 page novel, you are lost if you haven’t read and marked the book. Stats exams are generally open book because there are so many formulas. Take home exams can be agonizing. They can be long and difficult. Since students don’t have to rely on memory, the prof will reason that he can make more challenging thinking-type questions.

Most gifted and talented teens move on to university with high hopes of challenging careers. They have to have good marks to attain their goals. With hard work and determination, exams can be aced by anyone. I don’t really find the university exams worse than my highschool exams. I find that the profs give ample hints about exam content during the last week of classes. They are at the students’ mercy and they have to stay on the good sides of students. If they make everyone fail, they may not have a job the next year!

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