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

Yesterday the students were making the exhibits for their NSTP projects during the term. Besides the grade school teaching and the library renovation, it turns out that there was an orphanage service, a dental mission, a river and nature clean up drive, and putting up of signboards going to the campus.

What’s ironic is that for about half of the students, they need the time working on the exhibits to complete their 40 (or is it 60?) hours requirement.

For the mechanics lab, David decided that the final exam today would be multiple choice, four questions per experiment/activity. Since there are seven experiments and three activities, that means a total of 40 questions.

There were questions about the theory, the materials, the procedure, the expected results, the measurements and the computations. Basically it still covered everything that had been taken up during the term, much more than the exam for the lecture subject did, because it was only about three tenths of the lab subject’s topic range.

We also decided that the students would just write the letter of their answers on the spaces provided to the left of the question, instead of having an answer sheet with circles they could shade.

It is the first time this term that I have made an exam that is more than one page, although it’s not the first one I’ve seen.

The other day Maila showed me her exams for Differential and Integral Calculus. Besides having a title page where the instructions (for the “candidates”) were written, it was also divided into three parts, based on our seminar about the stages of learning. So there were questions that dealt with remembering, correlating and analyzing. In fact she said that if they perfected the first two (and supposedly easiest) parts, they would already pass the exam.

No wonder it took until 830am yesterday for both of our exams to be reproduced in the accounting office photocopier. I should have just asked for my 16 copies to be done first. I could have picked it up myself and probably would have started my exam at 810am. But then that would have meant that Brian would have been an hour and thirty minutes late when he arrived. Either way, I assume no one would have left the exam room before then.

In the end, David’s exam was not only 5 pages, it also had two sets. That meant 300 pages photocopied and collated, that again moved the start of the exam to 8:30 a.m. It also meant extra care distributing the papers to the students depending on the seating arrangement.

At least there were three of us teachers proctoring, with only twenty students per classroom, even though thirty students each could have fit in two classrooms.

David also announced that today was the last day of submission for his requirements. Even with that, he lowered the passing percentage to 55, and he asked me what to with those who only got 50% and above but still did not make the cut off.

I’ll continue this tale tomorrow.