Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

First day of finals here in school for me. All I have to do today is prepare my exam for Mathematical Methods tomorrow (1030am), and the one for Astronomy on Monday (8am).

Since the Astronomy one has more students, that's the one I finished first.

The Math exam only has 10 students, because one of the students already had his exam yesterday from 11am to 1pm. I made that exam in an hour after my Math class yesterday, and it contained exactly one error, which I corrected while he was already taking the exam.

He found the exam difficult, and that's what he told his classmates, although I didn't let him keep the questionnaire to give his classmates the benefit of the doubt if I'll be using the same exam. I won't.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In my astronomy classes last Wednesday, I told them the decision to take the finals or not (for those who met the requirements) expires at the end of the period. If I did not receive the paper with their pre-final grade computation by then, I would assume that they are taking the finals.

This is to prevent students who are not satisfied with a 3.0 or a 3.5 to try to bolster up their grades with late submissions just so that they can expect a four-point-zero.

I also strictly adhered to the policy of no-rounding up to reach the 60% minimum class standing for not taking the finals.

There was one athlete (there seem to be a lot of them in my 230pm class, all for non-basketball sports) who said he was absent during some of the activities not because they had a game, but because their game was the next day and they had to practice. I told him to get me a letter from the dean of student activities giving the dates of their practices, and I'll excuse him from those activities he missed.

One student today handed in a whole envelope full of articles, even though the deadline was Wednesday, just so she can boost up her 5% teacher's evaluation to the highest possible at 10%. I'm not going to count them though.

There were also some students who showed up today asking to see if they may not take the finals, even though they were absent on Wednesday (two are still sick; one sent his cousin and the other his classmate). First I asked them for an excuse letter for why they were absent, so that I could extend the deadline for them. Otherwise, their absence last Wednesday is unexcused and therefore they won't be given the same benefit of those who were present.

In my graphics class yesterday I had them draw lots as to which of the two longest exercises they were going to make again from scratch for their finals. I asked all the free-slotters to leave the computer room, even those who requested to stay to finish some of their requirements in other classes.

I didn't implement the "absolutely no talking" rule, because it would have been very obvious who couldn't (and didn't) do their own exercises previously. They all more or less passed. There's one student though who was absent (his girlfriend said he was sick), so I'm waiting for his excuse letter (passing through the dean's office, of course) to give him consideration.

Today my thesis advisee also brought his paper to the department for the panelists to read. But that's a story for the subsequent post.