This week marks the final few steps of the academic year for many of us, and for some, the end of our education at the University of York.
With most of our coursework handed in, and presentations given, it falls down to the final few to sit through hours of academic torture before you can celebrate with all of your friends, rather than just getting awkwardly drunk with those people from your seminar that you don’t even like, or know the names of.
However, York never seems to get it quite right when it comes to exams. Whether it is forgetting to bring enough papers to the exam hall, the exam itself being delayed, or mix-up in the marking of papers, this University seems to find one way or another to complicate the process and make the lives of both the students and the academics more difficult.
The concept of the exam itself also fails to test the skills that students should be focusing on. As opposed to long-term passion and knowledge for the subject, short-term retention of learning are the order of the day, with the top exam marks usually coming for those who have spent the most time sitting in the library revising, rather than those who have correctly learnt their modules and are able to purvey their views succinctly.
Wouldn’t you rather slog it out in the early hours in the library, finishing off a well thought-out, planned and interesting essay? One that you’ve been able to spend ample amounts of time on (or perhaps more realistically, the last couple of days before a deadline), rather than worrying about an exam that you cannot fully plan for, and end up usually finding horrendously difficult anyway?
At least then, you can be somewhat satisfied with your own work, rather than being put down by those smug know-it-alls who always come out of the exam boasting about how easy they found it and how they’ve written twice as many pages as you.
You can write in peace, rather than having the invigilators coming round and smothering you in the scent of their armpit whilst they repeatedly check your face against your uni card.
I have deliberately selected my third year modules based on their final assessment method. Whilst this technique may not see me studying the most enjoyable or interesting topics, it instead gives me the best opportunity at salvaging my degree from the dark, unspoken depths of a 2.2 (or below), the thought of which looms ever larger on a hungover post-Willow morning.
I will not end up in a stuffy lecture hall, sweating profusely with my hand close to bleeding after writing for three hours about the merits of an organisation’s HR function, a nightmare that I am sure many others share.
The solution? Cancel the exams or avoid them for your good. Embrace the 4,000 word essay, and better organise your time. Who knows? We might even end up being able to make something of our time here, instead of relying on the poor organisation skills of the University during examination period.
I rejoice in relying on the temperamental VLE, plagued by online maintenance periods that conspire to run my degree, as well as repeatedly failing to accept my submissions due to size limits. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself when I end up with a job serving chips in the Roger Kirk Centre in two years time.