2009.2 (Exams, Part 3)

The new semester began yesterday. However, I cancelled my M&B classes this morning to attend a talk by Prof Jomo KS on climate change and development.

Before I forget, summary of last semester’s batch:

Number of students: 85
Highest score: 77.40% (A−)
Lowest score: 31.08% (F)
Average score: 51.77% (C)
Median score: 51.34% (C)
Standard deviation: 9.31%
Number of students failing the course: 36
Number of students failing the final examination paper: 61

The university records system automatically round the results to the nearest integer, so the final number of fails is 22. All the numbers above exclude two students who were barred from the final exam.

One student scored zero. He turned up at 1020 when the exam started at 0900, saying that he overslept. We turned him away, of course, as per examination rules.

The very next day a student emailed me about a resit exam. She was sure of failing the course (and in fact she did). The email annoyed me to bits, as I have not even started marking, and it means extra work preparing the resit paper. Students often fail on resit anyway, and I don’t think this one will be any different. We discussed abolishing resit exams at the kulliyyah meeting before, but nothing concrete has come from it.

A few days later another student ambushed me at the corridor. He was concerned about his performance in the exam. I told him that there is nothing that he could do now and I was still marking the paper. “Of course,” he said, “only you can help me.” Yes, I got the not-so-subtle message.

He was wrong.