This is slightly earlier than normal, but given that my friend from home is coming to Helsinki tomorrow, and I actually have something to write about right now I thought I may as well go ahead.
On Monday, as I mentioned in my last post, I had an exam. It was my first 'real' exam here, as I don't count the one where I was given the questions in advance and was able to use my notes really that worthy of the title!
Anyway... I arrived at 12 to the room as instructed, and it turned out to be a normal lecture theatre (all of my classes are in small tutorial rooms) and we were expected to sit in the seats with a table in front of us. The only thing was, there was no way of getting out of the seats other than asking every single other person in the asile to get up, move out of the way and let you pass. So I decided that was slightly impratical (what if I needed the toilet???) and tried to sit near the end of the row. Then I noticed that everyone was going up to the front to get scraps of paper to write their answers on and subsequently lost the seat I'd previously claimed.
Then I started to get worried - I was doing the second sitting of my exam as I'd missed the first one when I went to Venice so there was probably only me from my class going to be there, and there were about 60 people in the room as it was a general faculty exam and all of the information was in Finnish. Then they started making annoucements in Finnish and I sat in my seat in the middle of the row panicking that I was in the wrong place as there weren't any signs saying 'these exams will take place today' or similar. So, it turns out, they just read out everyones name on a list, you went up to the front (disturbing everyone, obiously) and took a sheet of paper from them. This had your individual exam questions on for which ever one you'd registered for online. Then they spoke in Finnish some more and we eventually started. Finally after 2 hours (some people were on 4 hour exams) they simply annouced 'if you're doing a 2 hour exam, you need to gather up your papers and bring it to the front' but there was no timekeeper to ensure that you actually did this, so in all honesty I could have carried on until 4pm and no one would have known. Then once you were done you took it back to the front of the room and put it in a pile.
That was it - no ID cards, no seat numbers, no attendence checks, no cheating checks as you could sit right next to someone, and no checking inside the dictionaries etc to make sure there isn't any additional information in it. Finnish students don't break rules but these exams are just set out for the international students to bend the rules. I didn't but it would have been damn easy to do so! Another thing is that here we don't have a student number, everything is done by name. You just write your full name at the top of the bit of paper (literally lined paper pulled from an excercise book) before you begin and then you're away.
Another thing of notable academic interest this week was the return of the essays from one of my classes. My friend and I (he's a Brit too) were dreading them as ours were awful as we wrote them in a couple of hours before running off to Riga. However, they came back and we both got 4/5 which is the equivilant of a high 2:1 in the UK... despite the fact that my friend (I am sure he won't mind me saying this) had the comments 'this is all very confusing, I'm not sure I understand' written at the end of the essay. Our teacher for this class is American so it wasn't a language issue either! It ceases to amaze me here how awful work can be and you can still do well - if I'd given my essay in at Edinburgh I'd be lucky to get above 40%, let alone around 67%. They certainly go in for the art of trying here - it's like them saying ah well you tried, you came to the classes and clearly tried to get something right, even if you did slightly miss the point!
Ah well... I am moving to the library next year and dying a very slow and painful death via webct.
