The thing about school?Â
The guy in charge of the course responded. And I think his response heated me and my class up even more haha, he did respond to at least two of my points in a way that I appreciate and understand.Â
Those being me saying our teacher wouldnât give us who graduated a course evaluation, but said it was only for those who completed the entire term. So we felt like she was trying to silence us. He said that he had given her permission since the courses are so similar and they had to go through pretty much the same replies twice, but that he now understood that it is important to have an evaluation for the first course too, especially for those who canât or donât want to continue studying. At the same time it kind of doesnât make sense since one girl in class contacted him before we got the evaluation, and at that point he was surprised that we hadnât gotten an evaluation... and if he had said it was okay to not give us an evaluation, I donât get why he would have been surprised. But oh well.
But then the rest was a mess. He kept a good tone and all so I didnât feel any passive agressive vibes or anything like that, but oh did he avoid half of the points I had made and poorly explained the few things he did explain.
I told him the calculations I had made about the time, that we only had second per question, that by that logic the test was no longer about knowledge but it was about how quickly a student can force out knowledge under stress, That the amount of things to answer was unproportionate to the time we had, and that the result would for sure be better if he would just give us at least 15 more minutes so we at least got a full hour. That us who didnât pass, but also those who did pass are unhappy about the time since it wasnât enoughm and in the case of those who did pass they felt like the extremely small timeframe didnât let them fully show what theyâve learned.
-His comment? â According to my statistics 23 people passed the test, 5 failed it and 4 people couldnât continue because they didnât hand in all assignments on time. Thatâs normal statistics for us and means that the test wasnât too hard. â. And in the â23 people passedâ statistics he was including people who only did the exam as a re-examination because they failed the exam last term because there were a bunch of people there who I have never seen before.Â
And that pissed me off, I guess it is hard to translate fully into English, but in Swedish the way he wrote it was that the contents and questions werenât too difficult. And I sit here like..that is clearly not what I tried to say anywhere within my email? I specifically talked about the timeframe not being enough for a fair chance. The things to answer werenât too difficult at all, the issue is when you have close to no time at all to do them so you canât fully focus and you donât have time to write down an answer while making sure youâve fully understood the question. He didnât even comment my calculations about how little time you had per question.Â
I brought up the point that everyone I have talked to in Sweden who study distance and campus courses or programs, Japanese and other programs, have been in shock about the timeframe and told me they had at least 2 hours minimum for exams of that size, with that much to do , to make sure they had enough time to calmly do it and then proof-read their exam before handing it in. All he said to that was â Because itâs distance you need to cut down a lot on the time given for the test â... but nothing more. I donât know how it is in other countries, but here, if you study distance and there is a big test that needs to be done and the school donât want to have to make all students travel for a test, a lot of schools work together with local education centers or universities and send them the test, for them to print out, then the students book a time with them to do the test under supervision, then hand it in to the supervisor who scans it and sends it to the school. I have never personally done that, but a handful of my friends have gotten to do that a few times. For some reason, that wasnât even an option. And if they need to cut down on the time that much, I donât get why the amount of questions on the test reflect the time they need to cut down, they canât just cut down on the time given for a test and then not do shit about the amount of questions, but he seemed to think that is fully fair.
Then I asked him why nothing we have done previously in the course is taken into account when grading us, since everyone I have talked to from other schools who have also studied Japanese have said that their teachers looked to the course as a whole and not only the exam. And Iâve had high grades and more than well passing grades for the entire course. And the fact that previous exams tested the exact same grammatical skills but even though we passed them we could be failed on this grammar exam. He didnât even respond to that part. He avoided it altogether.Â
Then he added â Itâs unfortunate whenever you have to fail an examâ ..excuse you? have to? Like itâs something all students just gotta plan to do at some point? Do you guys statistically make people fail or what?
Then he reacted to me telling him that all they said about the exam was that it would be grammar, there was no information that half of the test would be a vocabulary test. And for the course as a whole, for 2 months, weâll have had to learn about 300 new words. Itâs not easy when you focus on the grammar parts since thatâs all theyâve said and suddeny most of the test is vocab, no old tests were available to look at for practice, and they had no real information about the exam anywhere except for â Youâre having a grammar exam on this dayâ. His reply to that was â I guess we should have been more clear about the vocabulary part. âÂ
I also asked him â How do I get another chance to pass the course I have studied? Because I am not going to continue on to the next course next term because of this, I am disappointed in the planning and I donât feel like your planning of the exams give people a fair chance. I just want to pass this course and leave it there.â He replied â Register for the next term, when you pass the exam you can continue on to the next course. â And I sat there like.. did you not.. fucking read....any of that? Iâm not going to keep studying?
Either way, I might fight with him for a bit longer. I havenât decided. But last night I sent a long-ass email directly to the schools support email, asking for their opinion on the whole thing, if they defend it Iâm going to lose half of my braincells but Iâll just accept that the school thinks this is a proper way of holding examinations and fuck off from there. I have already applied for other things for next term so..
