Exams without students

So another semester is wrapping up quickly and our jammed exam session is right on the door. As an erasmus student spending a whole accademic year in a new university, it usually takes some time before you are acquainted with how the new accademical environment works and what it has to offer in terms of facilities. Therefore in this post I am going to illustrate some of the similarities and differences I noticed so far on exam period between my host university, University of Technology of Gdansk, and my home university, University of Perugia.

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Exam session

This coming exam session is going to be the first one I will be attending at the Gdansk Univesity of Technology and so far I have to say that I am thrilled to be here and do my exams. There goes a famous quote 'nobody said that it would be easy but that it would be worth it' and in such times where the students are asked to perform I believe it is good to be reminded that hardwork pays. Many times, even as students, we get cought up in our daily routines and forget to lift our head and see the bigger picture, often getting less in contact with our human side because most of our thoughts are directed towards that exam we are preparing for.

In various occasions I had the chance to see for myself, in my home university, how it was like to have two months worth of exam session: each professor plans two to three exam days and in most cases the student is free to choose which day works best for him/her; given the fact that most exams have both a written and an oral examination, writing down a personal exam schedule prior to the exam session, for the sake of being organised, can be tricky for the student but this skill can be improved by time.

In my host university you still would need a personal exam schedule because for example in my faculty there are eight courses in the first semester so a little planning goes a long way and the real exam session lasts for no more than two weeks followed by a one week time for any grade improvements, but I must say there is a high concentration of tests of different courses all at the end of the semester.

Many say that and I quote 'it is at hard times that a person's true character shows' so during the infamous exam session you find yourself doing everything to pass an exam that you have been anticipating for long, which sounds like something anybody would do. But it wasn't rare to see some students go to some extremes and at times I was also complice of it: lack of collaboration prior/during exam sessions, isolation and just maintaing a wall in communication making it hard to even exchange simple ideas or study material. So, as far as an erasmus student, in my host university things have been going smoothly: the communication and information exchange between both local Polish students and other erasmus students has been improving by the day, which makes the encounters much more enjoyable and productive.

Evaluation system

Many might say that based on the grades you get from the exam one can tell if you have been studying properly during the semester and have fulfilled the 'requirements' for the given course. To this I say well ok I understand that alphanumerical grading system might result as the conventional and mostly spread way to select the hardworking students from those who for some reason didn't respond well to the requisites of the system and, as a result of it, failed. Failure is just there to redirect you to your original path, be it in your accademical carrier or personal life, so next time you are contemplating failure think positive and take it as a chance to review how you delt with things until that failure struck you: perhaps you need to change the way you study and go from cramming on the last minute to making little daily efforts in order to break down the difficulty into manageable bite sizes. For some of us it might sound too ambituos but trust me when I say this, it works; I have struggled with it too and through my life as a student I got to see that having a positive attitude in front of failure comes with a lot of practice that takes time to fully embrace so don't expect it to happen over one night.

Apart from this reflection on failure, the evaluation for each exam in my home university is out of thirty and fixed passing treshold is eighteen but every now and then, exceptions might occur some exceptions: for example the result of a written exam might be accepted even if under the minimum treshold with the condition of undergoing an oral examination such that to make the combined results sufficient for clearing that exam.

My host university does things differently when it comes to final exam results: during the semester the professors arranges some tests to be taken and you have to be above the treshold which is different from subject to subject. The final result is out of five and takes into account the test results and in some cases presence during lecture hours, extra activities such as presentations on different topics and homeworks. But as things might differ in other faculties, this is only true for the courses that I am actually attending at the faculty of civil and environmental engineering.

Cheers everyone for reading !