Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

Continuing my description of my preparation for the first day of finals week, I left the faculty room and the school on the last day of the second to the last week of classes with just one printout of my exam for Mathematical Methods One at 8am and one for Differential Equations at 1015am.

For the MM1 finals, there were only 20 questions, and I had two layouts of the questionnaire on one page, so I only needed to photocopy half as many copies as I had students in that class.

For DIFEREQ, there were 5 repeats of the questionnaire on one page (I only put in nine questions, as usual, and six of them I culled from the three previous exams just to see how well the students really absorbed the methods we took up in class), and I only had two-thirds as many students here as in the other class, so I needed to reproduce only a fourth of the number from MM1 for the second exam.

But back to the first test first.

I got to school on the first day of finals thirty minutes before the schedule, but even though two terms ago the photocopier was already open at that time, which was when I usually had my exams reprinted, the secretary told me that it was no longer the case – because it was a new school year, it was a new policy?

I asked about the machine at the library and at the Executive Vice President’s office, and she said that those would open at 8am as well.

So, as a last resort, she allowed me to just print as many copies as I needed, seeing that it was at least not one page per student in my class, but less.

What I didn’t expect - and I should have checked since I had enough time to prepare and review the test paper - was that the word processor I used had again continued the numbering of the first part when I copied and pasted it to the bottom of the page.

What is worse is that I forgot that I had deleted three problems near the end of the list, so that immediately after number 13 was number 17. That meant that there were, in fact, only seventeen questions in their finals.

I only found out about this during the exam itself, when there were questions about why the items started with number four, and I just told them to renumber the questions themselves. There was even some confusion about this because a few students didn’t notice that some of the problems were in columns, so they thought there were less than seventeen items.

I will really have to look up how to turn off that automatic renumbering in the software. In the meantime, session 729’s own numbering stops here. Class dismissed.