The TESTING Season of Final Exams

Tuesday 2nd February
Yesss! We are into the final month of my desert life out here in Saudi Arabia. And as the weeks go it is more and more satisfying to walk over to the college knowing that such short trips are to end soon. Right now is exam season for all students. I like this time of year. It is like “handover time” where you as the teacher have done your stuff and now comes the great “leveller” that is the exam itself. No more moaning to you if they get bad marks, no disputing the answers, no, “WHY did you only give me 16 out of 20?”, moaners and groaners.

Well, there IS still that thing called “marking” to do but really that is not much of a chore because I know in my mind that it is the last time I will be doing it for a while. And I am very pleased to say that I HAVE finished all my marking already and all I have to do now is fill in the grading sheets, get them signed and then file away the tests either in my filing drawer or back in the Registry Department where they must be signed back in.

And what of the exams? Well, I mentioned last time about the mistakes on the pre-clinical exam. Ahh but that is NOT where it ends for I have also been involved in the 2nd year CLINICAL exam, which basically was a summary writing exercise as I have tried to do with them all year.

Sadly/Embarrassingly/Farcically there were problems with THAT exam too. Although I was involved in the writing of it, all I had to do was write a sample answer. I did offer some help in the form of texts that could have been used, but this was rejected by the other guy I was to do the tests with. OK, I thought, if you want to keep it to yourself, you can do so.

Well, his instructions for what to do were EXTREMELY confusing. I was assigned as “examiner” yesterday which meant that I did not sit in the classroom all the time but was only required in the first 10-15 minutes or so in case of student questions. Yes, they have two different roles here of “examiner” and “invigilator” which makes sense as an invigilator can go anywhere to any exam and need not know about the subject. But they consider here that students ARE allowed to ask the examiner to clarify what the question is asking them to do. I myself think even THAT is questionable since understanding and interpreting the question is all part of doing the exam. BUT, of course, these are foreign language students doing an exam written ENTIRELY in English so I suppose there is a case to justify having such an “examiner” present. The examiner IS a teacher of that year and of that subject. So, for example, yesterday I was assigned as “examiner” to three rooms where students were taking Clinical writing exams of what I had been doing that year with MY Clinical class and so I could advise if there were problems.

Well, it was not even two minutes past nine o'clock and the phone rang in the English department. I was just ready to go up there anyway, but there was a call STRAIGHT AWAY that my help was needed! Seemed odd that the exam had only JUST BEGUN and there was a problem.

Up I went and to the room I had been called to. There were five or six students who had questions, and all of those questions were similar. And when I looked at the wording of the question, I KNEW I was in for a bad time.

Oh, but BEFORE I'd even ENTERED any classroom I was confronted by the College registrar in the corridor asking how long this particular exam was. I was rather confused and answered that it was 2 hours like all of them. Well, on the exam paper it says 1 hour 30 minutes, he said. OK, I said, if that is what the paper says, then that is what it is. “Isn't this a unified course?”, he asked me. Didn't understand why he was asking that so I answered that yes, for sure it is. He repeated his question of how long the exam was and I repeated my answer, and then AGAIN he repeated the question about it being a “unified course” or not. WHY on earth is he asking me this question more than once, I thought.

I only found out much later that SOME of the exam papers said “2 HOURS” on the cover, while others said “1 HOUR 30 MINUTES”!! SOMEBODY wasn't proofreading, and the finger of suspicion HAS TO point at our dear-departed Head of Department.

Well, you know, when you know you're leaving, such “minor details” just slip on by your attention ….

OK, so into this classroom where I had been summoned to, and to what I was saying about the wording of the question. The wording was BAD! It started off OK informing students they had to “Write a summary of 6 to 10 words”. OK, good start. But the next sentence told them to “Paraphrase the vocabulary”. The next two sentences told them, “Do not copy any of the original text” (good!) and the last sentence was the worst of all. It stated that they should, “Leave a space between each of your sentences”.

Now, wait a minute here. They SHOULD have been writing a paragraph, should they not?? You would have thought so, and yet NO MENTION of the word “paragraph” in the question. There was one section of the coursebook where the requirement WAS to write a ten-sentence summary of the text, and in THAT question they DID have to specifically write each sentence on a new line. NOT as a paragraph! So THAT was what I thought the question must be meaning.

And THAT is what I told them to do. Write each sentence with a clear blank line separating each one, minimum six, maximum ten sentences. Number them if you want to. Because THAT is how the question wanted to be answered – well, that was MY interpretation.

Later on, I explained that same fact to our de-facto Head of Department and said that this was what I had told the students. Now, some students HAD written in paragraph form and some in separated-sentence form. Not very satisfactory, but as I pointed out there was no mention of the word “paragraph” anywhere.

This teacher colleague in question had criticised our own HoD for doing all the Pre-Clinical exams by himself with THOSE resulting question errors. Now he had done the SAME THING himself.

A simple bit of proofreading would have eliminated such mistakes I'm sure. And in the end-semester final exams I do not think that such mistakes reflect well on the English department. OK, in individual class quizzes they are less vital, but the Final Exams are the things that count for the most marks.

Another minus point for this “fine educational institute” that I work in (for another 18 days) …

Ach, WHO BLOODY CARES? Doesn't matter to me now cos HEE! HEE! in eighteen short and sweet days I am well and truly OUTTA HERE!

All I have to do now is fill in the three grade sheets for each of my classes … which led to another tricky problem. And ONCE AGAIN it involved our soon-to-be-departed hospital colleague. Now, since he couldn't teach his class, they were divided up and we all got an extra 5 or 6 students each as you know. HOWEVER, for the purpose of filling in this Final Grading Sheet (the 'Long Sheet' as it was known as it was foolscap paper size), we needed his marks for quizzes and tests for those students in HIS class.

He didn't have them. He had already shredded all the quizzes and progress test papers even before the end of semester. So what had he done with the marks? Nope, he did NOT have them on his flash drive. Ohh, but where WERE THEY?

The story is, as I understand it, that he had used one computer to save the spreadsheets on that contained all these marks. When he came to find them, HEY PRESTO they had 'magically' vanished!

No, he did not have them on either his own personal flash drive NOR his laptop at home. In short, he had no backup of them at all! ALL his marks had gone – no copies on paper even and no old tests to refer to as they had gone to the shredder LONG AGO!

The more and more time goes on, the chinks in this guy's armoury become bigger holes and now he has BIG dirty-great holes in the armoury. He always portrays himself as being professional and generally as knowing what he is doing. But COME ON!! WHAT A BASIC THING NOT TO DO! NO RECORD ANYWHERE of your own students' marks!!

Well, like it or not, he would have to either find them or search his memory to “recreate” them. But what did he spend his time doing? Running around trying to find out WHY they had disappeared and WHO had deleted them! HOW IS THAT GONNA HELP YOU MATEY! You got to come up with these pretty damn quickly because there are FOUR of your teacher colleagues who NEED those marks.

There again, you see. Because of his irresponsible actions (you think that word is too strong? Well, I DON'T!), he could be dropping his colleagues in the “smelly brown stuff”.

As far as I was concerned, if he had no marks to give then I would simply marks all his students as having zero for the semester and HE would take the rap for it!

OK OK guys – no of course I am NOT in any way the perfect guy or the perfect teacher. I don't try to be either. But FOR GOODNESS SAKE! There are BASIC things that you just HAVE TO take care of and this is ONE of them.

OK OK OKAYYYY! I should have more sympathy with the guy since he has had his spell in hospital. But he was fine when he went and shredded his test papers, WASN'T HE? And quite well when he didn't think where he went and stored his marks, DON'T YOU AGREE?

The answer to that is WHO KNOWS? Here is the guy who STILL claims he never had any discipline problems in his soldier boy class. The one who says he hates the college but not Saudi Arabia. The very man who does take a lot of time preparing extra materials for his classes. Ah, but WAIT! In doing these “extra materials”, he neglected to do what the syllabus said meaning that when his students came to our classes they had NOT done most of the grammar book and almost NONE of the very good writing book. This is also the guy whose classroom desk was in a complete mess with papers absolutely EVERYWHERE all over it when it had to be cleared.

Sorry, but I don't think he is so hot-shot organised as all THAT that he makes himself out to be. All this about being Director of Studies here and there. All this about his 35 years of teaching (which he HIMSELF said was not a COMPLETE 35 teaching years but was broken into many parts). And all this mocking of me for “not understanding” how things are out here!

The guy is 58 years old and knows he is going nowhere else as far as employment goes. Oh, but he could get a job back home in Holland, he says. I doubt THAT too. So WHY is he staying here in a country he has increasingly moaned at as time has gone on? Sure beats me!

We English teachers are an imperfect bunch it has to be said. Some would say we do this because we can do little else. There is some element of truth in that in some cases. But there are BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL things that DO need doing in the job whether that is the admin side or the classroom side.

Do I do them all? No, I do not, but I AM confident that I DO get the basics right.

OK, enough about that. He HAS now produced a “piece of paper” with some “marks” on which I have duly added to my grading sheet for “his” students. Actually what the TRUTH of these is not my concern – I am just going to write them down and be done with it!

Eighteen days … eighteen days … OHHH ONLY EIGHTEEN DAYS!!!