Goksin!

I pulled one last stint before I (crossing my fingers) graduate - I complained about the examination and wrote a letter to a Head of School.

Dear Head of School of Economics XXX,

I am writing this letter as a student of the School who sat for the Economics (I) Honours exam on the 20th of November 2008. My student ID number is uXXX and I am in my final semester of a Bachelor of Commerce/Information Technology degree.

Never in my four years of study have I been so disappointed with an examination, not due to the lack of preparation on my part. I do apologise for not sending this letter in earlier as I got caught up with other things and finally found time to sit down and type it out. I did approach the College of Business and Economics on that day itself and was told that I should bring this issue to you.

Firstly, I would like to bring to your knowledge that there was a discrepancy between the examination times according to the Timetabling information we were provided with and the examination times written on the examination paper itself.

On Timetabling (and even on the door of the examination room) the exam was supposed to start at 9:20am, with 10 minutes of reading time and the writing time to start at 9:30am. The examination paper had, on its cover, written that reading time was 15 minutes, and the invigilators had started the exam at 9:16am to be exact. I arrived at 9:18am (I looked at the clock the moment I stepped in, and was surprised to see everyone already reading their papers). At that moment in time, panic rushed through me, and I thought I was late, which according to the time written on the board, I was.

I find this absolutely unfair as the paper was not supposed to start till 9:20am. Due to this fact, not only was I cheated of some of my reading time (I do admit it is not a lot, but every minute counts in an exam), I was also overcome by a feeling of panic which affected me somewhat.

Besides the difference in time, there was also a discrepancy regarding the permitted materials. According to the examination information that was provided, no permitted materials were allowed into the examination. However, on the exam paper, it was clearly written that calculators were allowed. This further put me in my state of panic and distress. I immediately shot up my hand to enquire about the calculators, and was told that it was "apparently not very helpful". Whilst this issue was later cleared up with calculators being provided by the college, it still affected me nonetheless.

Yet another issue is probably not as critical as the rest, but I always thought that the presence of the lecturer at the start of an exam was a must. This helped students cleared up any questions they had about the paper, if there was any. In this case, I had plenty, but the lecturer was nowhere to be found. According to an email I sent him a few days before the exam he was "out of town until after the exam". In that case, shouldn't there be some sort of a substitute to which we could point our questions towards?

Aside from that, there is another issue, which could be due to lack of work on my part, although I have asked around and it seems that many other students who took the exam felt the same. All throughout the semester, I have attended every class, and in each class we were taught probabilities which involve 2 variables and Game Theory problems which involve 2 firms or 2 parties. In the exam, we were faced with problems which involved 3 variables and 3 firms. I find this somewhat unfair as we have not been exposed to ways to solve these types of questions. It might be such that the lecturer was trying to test to what extent we have done our own studies, but to have put 2 out of 3 questions in such a way is pretty much testing our limits.

In writing this letter, I am not hoping for a miracle for me to get surprisingly high marks due to my complaints, but I would really like to see the School do something about it. It is not a fair assessment to all those who attended. Students who took the trouble to attend the extra Economics (I) Honours classes on top of the mandatory Macroeconomics (I) classes, and even more so those who bothered to show up for the exam should not be punished with such unfair assessment methods.

I appreciate your time spent reading this letter and I hope to receive a favourable reply soon.



Sincerely,

XXX.

Honestly, I don't know what he can do. Results are out on Monday, and it's after 5pm in Aussie already. Seeing as he hasn't replied, he probably wouldn't get the email until after the results have been released.

But still, I voiced out my concerns and the part where I said "I am not hoping for a miracle for me to get surprisingly high marks"? I lied.