It’s raining, it’s pouring, and I have to go out to the post office (the orders keep trickling in! Yay!), and to buy some eggs so I can do some baking with the girl because I’m sick of her nagging and there’s just no way around it, some baking needs to happen! Now! Today! Soon! Or else! Calamity!
Anyway, I just need to write and express my frustration about uni. The thing is, I was supposed to sit an exam tomorrow. They were going to advise us of the exam date (that took long enough, but it came through eventually), and find someone to do the exam supervision for us. Then I got an email from student services saying they couldn’t find anyone for me and to please find an invigilator myself. But they would also continue looking, and if they found someone for me before the exam, I would have to cancel any arrangements I had made. That’s bad enough, I have two problems with that – a) either you do commit to find someone for EVERY student and not burden some with the task but not others, and b) if you can’t find an invigilator by a certain date, you do at least let the student stick with any arrangements they’ve made and not force them to cancel if you find someone at the last minute.
Exam supervision has always been a tricky subject (the joys of studying externally!)… our local library used to do it and that was ideal. But apparently there was an “incident” with a student who abused the library staff when they were given the wrong exam. So that one person ruined it for all of us and council advised the librarians that they couldn’t do it for anyone anymore. Grrrrrrrrrrrreat.
Now you can’t just get anyone to supervise an exam – it has to be a professional of “high standing” such as a police officer, librarian, solicitor, JP, teacher, religious clergy, etc. – you get the idea. And you can’t be friends or relatives with them. And this exam is even more difficult because there is an oral component and they want to you to use a tape recorder to record that. Ancient technology! Who has a tape recorder anymore these days? And I refuse to buy one for this purpose alone, because I’d never use it again (do they even sell them anymore? I had a quick look at Big W the other day and couldn’t see any unless they were part of a stereo set-up with a CD player and speakers etc.).
Being who I am, I find it very stressful approaching complete strangers to ask about this, and most people have never heard of exams being sat this way and are then not very helpful anyway… don’t want to be involved, it sounds like too much trouble.
OK, so the uni eventually found a place for me to sit the exam… the only problem being, while the place isn’t too far away, it would have taken me over 5 hours to get there by public transport! I don’t hold that against them, they’re in a different state, there’s no way for them to know how inadequate public transport can be in these parts… and once I told them how hard it would be to get there, they didn’t insist.
And I have to, HAVE to be in Sydney tomorrow afternoon by 4pm. That’s non-negotiable, I have plans that I cannot cancel and that were made long before I was advised of the exam date.
So eventually student services at the uni said, sorry, we can’t help you, there’s nothing else we can do… contact your course co-ordinator and try to work out something with them. I did that, and haven’t heard back. Nothing. Nada. Nix. It’s now Thursday afternoon and the exam was supposed to be sat tomorrow morning.
They’d better figure out an alternative because this was a double unit and I have no intention of seeing 6 months of study go to waste because they can’t think of a better way to do exams. I think in future I’ll have to choose my units based on whether there’s a final exam requiring an invigilator or not. It’s such a load of rot. Probably alright if you live in a city and there are lots of libraries and unis and other places to choose from, but not here.
Gah, I’m so frustrated.
