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

For the past two days, Maila has been giving removal exams to students. In fact, it started last Friday.

From what I heard said by her students (mostly engineering), her exam in Calculus was open notes open book. Those who did not pass that exam were given a removal exam just a few minutes later, which comprised of the questions they did not answer from the earlier exam.

As far as I can tell the two students who took the exam finished by the time we left at around 5pm, both getting a grade of 1.0 for answering her questions.

That is, after all, the purpose of the removal exam: the student’s current standing is in the limbo between passing and failing the course. If the student passes the removal exam, then he gets the lowest possible passing grade. Otherwise, the student proves without a doubt that he deserves to fail the course.

On the course card day itself, last Monday, there were still some students of hers who were taking removal exams, told by the secretary to proceed to the conference room when they got into the faculty room to get their course cards.

She arrived in the afternoon and handed out the rest of the course cards. I thought that was the end of it.

Yesterday when I gave a special exam in mechanics to a student who spent the last few weeks in the hospital, I was surprised to see that she gave another engineering student a removal exam.

But when he submitted his paper without the answers that would satisfy her, she gave him another exam (I don’t know if it was the same questions or not) to take home, that he could scan and send to her e-mail.

She insisted that the student should really understand the concepts before she could give him a passing grade.

Today she gave an exam to the same student I gave an exam to yesterday, and during lunch in the cafeteria when we asked him if he passed he said he will be taking another exam from her tomorrow.

What’s my point? I don’t know if I’ll be able to do the same thing she does, despite the fact that we both teach subjects that are prerequisites to advanced lessons.

Besides the fact that it forces the student (and the teacher) go through a lot of extra effort just to get the lowest possible passing grade (which they should have exerted during the term in the first place, given all the opportunities offered to them), I believe that it is sound policy to impress on the students that the schedule for course card distribution is the last day when the teacher gives his final evaluation of the students’ performance, with no exceptions outside of medical or family emergencies.
And that, I might add, was a very long sentence.

Seriously though: sometimes, the real world doesn’t give us extensions to deadlines and/or second chances. It’s a harsh truth that people should start to learn in college, instead of having someone hold their hand and spoon feed them like all throughout high school. Else they’re in for a ruder wake up call.