[Barry the Sprout]

Yesterday I had an exam - Microeconomic Principles. It wasn't one I was prepared for very well, to say the least. But anyway. About one hour into the three hour exam a fire alarm went off, the whole building had to be evacuated - 7 floors of students, most of them doing the same exam. So we all waited on the pavement outside the building and discussed the exam... talked about how the questions had gone, asked friends how to do certain questions, the usual. We did this in the certain knowledge that they couldn't possibly send us back into an exam that counts for a possible 1/5th of our degrees after we'd had the opportunity for 3/4 of an hour to talk about it. So what did they do? Yeah, thats right... they sent us back in.

This should appear like a godsend, particularly in a hard exam, but there are several things that really, really, annoyed me about it:

1. They didn't make up the time taken out by enough. We were out for 3/4 of an hour and were only given half an hour to make up for it. Not good... ran out of time.

2. Despite having looked through the entire paper in despeation for the first few minutes I couldn't think of anything specific to ask people about.... I was reduced to wandering around in a shell shocked daze and feeling saddened by the enthusiasm my friends seemed to be showing for the paper.


3. As I've touched on above - everyone I talked to when we came out after the fire alarm reckoned that the paper was easy. But then after the whole paper was finished they all seemed to think that it had in fact been really difficult after all. In some ways this makes me feel slightly better, but a fail is still a fail - no matter how many people get one.

4. The exam board have e-mailed us all to say that the situation will be "taken into account" when grading the papers. What does that mean!!! Are they going to add marks on for the disruption? Are they going to take marks off for the ability to blatantly cheat? They won't say exactly what they're going to do, they're just going to take it into account...

All because the examiners can't be bothered to re-schedule it and use the reserve paper. Very frustrating.