Don't care (bonus story at the end)

[Iseeyouthere]

I'm currently a supervisor for some Year 12 High School exams. My job is to prepare the question and answer sheets for the students, collect them when the exam is over and watch them suffer for 2-3 hours.

It may seem like boring work, but its not that bad. I get a huge chance to daydream during that time and I like helping the students with certain questions. Keyword there: CERTAIN. I don't help them at all with the answers. I only answer questions like "Do I use a new page for this question?" or "Do I do question 1 or 2 or both?" or "Can I use the toilet?"

Now, sometimes the poor student run out of time and misses their chance to complete a question. We tell them to mark down as "Not Attempted". It sucks but rules are rules.

We allow students to leave after an hour IF they feel like they have done enough work (we also stop letting them out 15 minutes before the end of the exam to stop disruption. If they finish during that time, we supervisors check their work, make sure they have got the correct pages and questions written down, sign them off and they are free.

Don't care.

Today was Ancient History, a 3 hour exam. 19 students.
After exactly one hour, a student put her hand up.
She said she was done.
Every single page she was given had "Not Attempted" written on them.
She didn't care.
She waited an hour, doing nothing.

Sadly, we can't force them to write something. They are told to write as much as they can. We ask if that was she wanted to write.
Yep. She didn't care about this subject.
She was signed out and she left.

Later, we found out from the teacher that she didn't take her lesson seriously and didn't care at all, among some of the other students who rushed, wrote "Not attempted" on some of their questions or basically wrote a sentence where a paragraph was expected.

Course... this was written down... so she won't be skipping away with-out consequence...
This didn't stop me from weeping for my generation. (I had only finished year 12 last year).


Bonus story!
A student put up their hand to be signed out. I looked at his papers and saw he had missed a question. I pointed this out and he was a little surprised, diving back into it and completing that question... then checking all his papers twice to make sure he didn't miss anything else.

He thank me a ton for letting him know he missed a question. He looked really happy.
I told him "No worries".

[Slayer]

That's interesting. Here, we had supervisors or our teacher, depending on the subject, to ask questions to. They'd only answer about how we should answer it or rearrange the words of the question to us as if this 'new' question held a magical key to understanding it.

Never heard of the "not attempted" before and I've never had anyone /ever/ look over my exam to see if everything was answered. I've had to sign in a couple of times, but never sign out. Then again, we were usually 60+ students taking an exam with maybe 3-4 different levels/subjects at one time (filled an entire full sized gym) in High School. Largest exam was University with an online course written final with 600+ students, lol. I still giggle at the amount of classrooms that was needed.

I have seen students sleep through the exam and leave after an hour (we had the same rule in HS) XD. We don't have the fifteen minute one though.

That's awesome for your bonus story! One question can sometimes make a huge difference in a final mark.

[Iseeyouthere]

The "Not Attempted" is there to prevent people thinking that they have lost an answers sheet. If the student hasn't completed the answer, we still have to collect their sheet, but it prevents the issue of "OMG! WHERES IS HIS QUESTION 18? DID WE LOSE IT?"

[Slayer]

The "Not Attempted" is there to prevent people thinking that they have lost an answers sheet. If the student hasn't completed the answer, we still have to collect their sheet, but it prevents the issue of "OMG! WHERES IS HIS QUESTION 18? DID WE LOSE IT?"

Ooooh, I see! Here, we either answered on the exam itself (where space is provided after each question) or we had a question sheet with a booklet similar to a 10-page copybook. If we needed more than that, we'd ask for another book and mark 1/2 on the first and 2/2 on the second (and so on). So if the answer isn't in there, it's marked wrong, that's it.

That does make sense then XD lol

I love learning about how other places conduct exams. Sometimes they're vastly different! *isadork*

[fireheart]

I'm guessing with the Ancient History, it was to satisfy the English/Arts/Social and Cultural Studies part of her Year 12 certificate. (which for those overseas includes English, Studies of Society and Environment, Performing and Visual Arts and Languages Other Than English) Alternately, it could be because the class she did want to do was full.

I got lucky, all of my classes were freely available.

Fun fact-among the subjects you can do for your Year 12 certificate, three of them are Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin
And if your school doesn't offer those three languages, then you can study them through Open Access IIRC.

[Midnight_Angel]

Today was Ancient History, a 3 hour exam. 19 students.
After exactly one hour, a student put her hand up.
She said she was done.
Every single page she was given had "Not Attempted" written on them.
She didn't care.
She waited an hour, doing nothing.

Guilty as charged

Some time ago, when I was attending university, I had exams in three subjects after a semester: fluid dynamics, heat transmission, and automatic control engineering. (I hope the translations are ok). These exams were some three weeks apart from one another.

So, I cram everything you never wanted to know about fluid dynamics into my head, merrily waltz into the room where the exam takes place, sit down, and listen to the assistant doing the introduction.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this semester's Heat Transmission Exam.

*checking my calendar* Righty-oh, heat transmission it is.
Which left my somewhat... underprepared.

A quick look at the questions confimed my fears: there's no way in hell I'm gonna pass this beast. So, immediately after the question sheets had been dealt, I wrote down my name and matriculation number, crossed out all answering spaces, and signalled I was ready to turn in my work.

Assistand didn't believe my at first, asked if I was feeling sick, whether I wanted to give it a try anyway, and was genuinely shocked when I answered "Thanks for the encouragement, but I am utterly unprepared, and rather than wasting three hours of my time sitting around and achieving maybe ten points out of 240, I prefer to try again next semester."

[SongsOfDragons]

I finished Sixth Form in 2005...unless they've changed everything since, I don't think we get a big certificate for just Year 12. GCSEs, AS and A2 are (were?) per subject only, and we need a certain amount of them to get into Sixth Form (GCSE) or University (A-levels).

Many of my friends, some including Masters postgrads, worked out their equivalent GPA for their big exams above, and most came out with a score that would have seen a complete fail. Jokes about education quality aside...it just goes to show the incongruity between these two education systems at least!!

I also remember a Yank friend going O.o at A-level grades, at least in my school... A, B, C, D, E, F, G - graded, you've only just passed, U - ungraded, not worth one mark, and X - did not attend.

Now for my exam stories... AS level English Lang had a question with a very verbose entry about hot air balloons or something. The question seemed to reference another example, or if it didn't, they didn't seem to make sense at all. I struggled, found out later that the entire hall struggled, found out later still that the entire country struggled. The lad who was next to me sat there after covering all the other questions, and after about 45 minutes he set it down and left - just walked out of the hall, no permission, no calling the adjudicators over, nothing. He fled and they couldn't catch him, but they saw the problem question he was stuck on...

And the best exam I've ever taken was A2 level Product Design. A3 sheets, lots of drawing and designing and colouring. So much fun. ^^

[Marmalady]

I'm old enough to have done GCEs (the old 'O' and 'A' levels)and our grades went A,B,C,D,E and U (ungraded). Only grades C and above were counted as passes, though.

We were never allowed to leave before the end of an exam, except in cases of medical emergency. If you finished before the allotted time, you sat and read a book or swotted for your next exam. I recall that in my French written, I finished with about an hour and a half to go - the invigilator noticed I was reading a book and came over to look at my papers. He was astounded to find that I had actually completed the entire thing - but then it was my best subject, that and English.

[fireheart]

The rule for our Year 12 exams (and for uni ones) is that there is a no-leave period of around 30 minutes at the start and 10-15 minutes at the end. (for the Year 12 ones, you can leave mostly whenever).

Not all subjects at Year 12 level had exams when I did my SACE (south australia certificate of education, there's one for each state, but they're mostly interchangeable for uni) in fact, I only had to sit exams for two subjects and they were Music and Psychology.

[Iseeyouthere]

Guilty as charged

Some time ago, when I was attending university, I had exams in three subjects after a semester: fluid dynamics, heat transmission, and automatic control engineering. (I hope the translations are ok). These exams were some three weeks apart from one another.

So, I cram everything you never wanted to know about fluid dynamics into my head, merrily waltz into the room where the exam takes place, sit down, and listen to the assistant doing the introduction.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this semester's Heat Transmission Exam.

*checking my calendar* Righty-oh, heat transmission it is.
Which left my somewhat... underprepared.

A quick look at the questions confimed my fears: there's no way in hell I'm gonna pass this beast. So, immediately after the question sheets had been dealt, I wrote down my name and matriculation number, crossed out all answering spaces, and signalled I was ready to turn in my work.

Assistand didn't believe my at first, asked if I was feeling sick, whether I wanted to give it a try anyway, and was genuinely shocked when I answered "Thanks for the encouragement, but I am utterly unprepared, and rather than wasting three hours of my time sitting around and achieving maybe ten points out of 240, I prefer to try again next semester."

While yours is more a case of "I mis-read my timetable", the girl was more a case of "I don't give a flying fudge about this".

[Gerrinson]

I'm glad my psych professor in college allowed us to leave whenever we were finished. All of his tests were composed of 10 multiple choice questions, with the final being 50 multiple choice questions.

I used to finish the weekly tests in 3 - 5 minutes, and finished the final in only 12 minutes out of the allotted 3 hours.

The professor actually called me into his office to congratulate me, as I was the 1st person ever to get a perfect score on his final exam. I finished the class with a total of 110 out of a possible 95 points. I had done all of the extra credit work offered just for fun.

I was also personally responsible for more people failing his class that semester than ever before because with my perfect test scores, I completely obliterated the curve for the entire semester, even on the final exam.

[Pojodan]

I'm reminded of my Calculus I class in college. Th professor had homework be work 20% of the final grade.

Turning in a sheet of paper with your name on it was worth 1 point, completing the homework and doing it properly was worth 2 points.

Guess how many blank sheets of paper I turned in

[Sapphire Silk]

I'm reminded of my Calculus I class in college. Th professor had homework be work 20% of the final grade.

Turning in a sheet of paper with your name on it was worth 1 point, completing the homework and doing it properly was worth 2 points.

Guess how many blank sheets of paper I turned in

Bet he never did that again

[Andara Bledin]

If the homework only counts for 1/5 of the grade and you can get essentially 10% (and only lose 10%) for just turning in a blank sheet of paper, why would you even bother doing it?

Of course, when you can half ass it for that other 10%...

That sounds like a rather poorly-thought-out plan, indeed.

^-.-^

[MnR]

I was also personally responsible for more people failing his class that semester than ever before because with my perfect test scores, I completely obliterated the curve for the entire semester, even on the final exam.

*Waves* I'm glad I'm not the only one ruining the curve for people. In my Intro to Psych class they practically called for my head. I would ditch constantly, yet could ace my exams due to my interest in the subject. The biggest curve in the class was 2 points when I accidentally circled the wrong answer. We'd all joke about the ways they wanted to dispose of me.