Term 1 Exams

Exam Week
This past week of school were term one exams. Since I have 4 classes, I had to write 4 3 hr exams. Which in case you don't know is a lot, and in reality all I could do was hope that it was doable in 3 hours and/or that it wasn't too easy.
During exam week, which for some classes only consisted of 3 days, we as teachers had to supervise exams. But, we are not supervising our own exams, so in case students have questions or there are typos, sorry, noone to help them. Which as I will explain later, can present a problem.
Now this was my first time ever proctoring an exam, and let me tell you, it is boring. Essentially for 3 hours I was singing songs in my head to try and keep myself awake.

Now lets talk cheating. It was amazing how many students would just start talking to their deskmate or would 'casually' look at the paper next to them. What is funny to me is that this is the easiest way to get caught, I wanted to be like, 'hello students, aren't you smart enough to cheat without getting caught.' Though I did not say this, instead I would remind them that this was the class' first warning and the next time I see it happen I would take the exam away and the student would get a zero.' Which honestly I don't even know if I had the power to do that, but whatever..haha.

Now lets talk paper usage. Wow. These students use a lot of paper. Even at the begining of the exam when I would explain to them how much paper they got, they would then raise their hand an hour later an say teacher I need the paper. Sometimes I caved and I would give them more, but sometimes I would say no. It is not because I am mean, but if the teacher who wrote the test says they only need so much paper, then thats all they are going to get, and here is why: students here write as much as they can for every problem, even if they have already answered the question, even if the question did not eask for examples. It is absurd,they just want to regurgitate their notes back, and thats pure memorization. Students here do not know how to be brief or how to summarize, or how to answer why questions, or how to explain something other than with a straight definition.

Now lets talk answers. While I was supervising exams I will admit that as students finished their test I would read their answers, because lets be real, what else do I have to do. As I was proctoring a geography exam, I saw by far the best answer ever, and it was on numerous people's paper. The question was explain the causes of population growth in Africa. Some of the students answered, 'African women are the most fertile women in the world.' First I want to say, that I honestly do not have any statistics to back this or not, but I am pretty sure that this in general is not true. Now the other reason I found it funny was because I was reading other exams I figured out what they meant to say, which is, 'African women are married young, so during their most fertile years they are having children constantly because most African families do not use family planning.' Note that these are two different reasons. I would even like to submit that there are American women who get married at 18, it just happens to be that a lot of Americans use family planning to decide when and if they have children.. But that is enough on that, I had just wanted to share what had given me a chuckle.

The Mixup
Every class is called by their year(grade) and their tract. For example, S5BCM, means senior 5 Biology Chemistry Mathmatics. Well the week before exams the exam board of Rwanda changed how classes were called. This made S4PCM into S4MPC, and S4MPC into S4PCM. Can you already envision what the mixup was. Long story short, my exam for S4PCM was given to the new PCM, aka a class that I do not teach. That then meant that my class did not have an exam, or rather I could not give them the same exam because they had already seen the exam the other class took. This meant that on wednesday afternoon I had to write a whole new exam, which was hard work, so I could then have the students take it on Thursday. gr. It should also be noted that I felt bad for the other teacher who had his students take my test and not his, and he had to keep it that way, he was not allowed to give them a new test, yet his class has chemistry 7 hours a week, and this one of mine only has it 2 hours a week, so the exams are obviously covering different information.

Grading, or as they say, Marking
I worked my ass off over the weekend because I had been told grades needed to be turned in on Monday. Grading 4 classes of approx. 40 students each is long, and hard. It is even harder when I have to constantly think about what english sentence they are trying to say. But in the end I got my 4 classes done. Well it ends up that one of the chemistry teachers is sick or left, or who knows, but I was asked to grade a chem exam for S1. I said of course because I understand it has to get done, and I'm TOO nice. It ends up it wasn't just one exam, but 3 classes' exam, which totalled roughly 150 extra exams for me to mark. I would also like to say I was not given the answers or the grading scheme, so I got to make that up all on my own. Great right. Wait, it gets better. Evidentally another teacher needed help, and I was given another exam to grade. So all of monday and tuesday I was marking exams that did't even belong to me. Now this just pissed my off because I ws tired of looking at exams, and I was tired of teachers asking me oh gina you aren't done marking yet, you need to hurry. Near the end of the day of tuesday I was 'barking' at them that these exams are not mine, I finished mine already. What also pissed me off was that other teachers were actually still marking their exams when I had finished marking 8 exams. WTF. Also I got very annoyed on Tuesday when the Senior 1 exams that I had marked, this teacher was in school and didn't say a word to me about the fact that I marked his exams. gr. But we will leave it that I am done marking, and nothing could convince me to mark anything or do anything for the rest of the week.