Hello my wonderful bloggers! Now I
know that it has been a while since my last post but I had presentations to do,
coursework to complete and exams to sit but nevertheless my second year at university
is over!! That is it; I have somehow made it through this year with minimal
breakdowns and still remained my slightly crazy self. For those of you who have
followed my blog since the beginning you will know that I started this blog not
long before I started my second year, and have said about various aspects of
the years (mostly to do with packing and unpacking)
Anyway, over the past few weeks, I
have been revising in order to sit my English Language and Education Studies
exams which I sat on the 21st (English) and the 22nd (Education) and
then on the 23rd my parents came to collect me and I made the
journey back to “good ol’ Yorkshire”. During the past week I had slowly been
packing so that it was the simple case of just packing it all into the car to
come home, so having finished my last exam on Friday at about quarter to 12 and
made my way back home with my housemate where I because to pack everything
completely.
Before we get into that we will
go back about two weeks and make our way forward. Like I had said I hadn’t really
done much but complete coursework, do two small presentations and then revise. For
my Education course we got to see the questions in advance and received them just after the Christmas break. My education exam consisted of two sections where we had a choice of 3 questions to choose from, we were only allowed to pick one from each section and yen had to write an essay for the answer. For my English course we got 3 sections,
two of which were unseen and then the third section was seen however it was
seen a week before the exam.
Now my education revision was pretty simple, I chose
my two questions, planned my essays and revised the information which was relevant
to my essay however my English revision was not so simple as it included
revising everything which I had done over the course of the year, this
included; ideology and power, child language acquisition and media studies. For my revision I prefer doing que cards as I am
unable to use mind maps however because que cards are my sole revision
techniques I often end up with a fair few, this year I ended up with about 119 and that was for English alone. When I got to see the seen-section of my exam it consisted of a news article,
an advert for a pen with a few comments and a transcript from a TV interview. Upon seeing these I had
a small breakdown and convinced myself I was failing the year, thankful I was texting a
friend who does the same course and she was straight on the phone to ring me to
calm me down.
You would think exams would be
straight forward, you go in to the room, sit the exam and then when the time is
up you leave the room and then however many weeks later you get the result. This
was not the case for my English exam. Due to being dyslexic I am provided with
25% extra time on top of my exam time so for a two hour exam I am given an
extra half hour just to make things easier for me and to ensure I have enough
time to read through what I have wrote. When doing exams at uni we are told we
can answer the questions in any order we like however I prefer doing it in
order as I will confuse myself and I will begin to panic. So the first section
of the exam went fine, I answered all questions, guessed on two of them but I still
answered and then I answered the first two parts of the second section without
an issue however getting to the third question on the second part is when the
issue arose. For the second section we were provided with a transcript of a
child talking to an investigator who was looking at the child language use. Whilst
the information at the start stated that the mother was present she did not speak
however the question asked “how does the mother language use help Adam develop
his own?” the issues with this is that the mother does not speak and the child
was not called Adam…
After calling the examiner over
to query the question she was just as confused as I was, yet at this time the
other students in the room with me all began saying the same thing, the
question was not right. So because of this someone was sent to get an English teacher
whilst we were told to continue with the rest of the questions. Overall it took at least
half an hour for them to come up with a solution as to what we were to do… that
solution? Answer the question as if it said “the investigator” and “the child” however
because we had lost half an hour waiting for this solution we were given
another half hour to complete the paper so this turned my two and a half hour
exam into a 3 hour exam. Needless to say none of us were happy about this
mistake.
The most likely reason for this is that, because my university writes
our exam papers they are able to use past questions off past papers (we are not
allowed to see past papers for this reason) and it is likely that the question
had been for a past paper however it was not changed to suit the paper we had
been given. After my exam, I went home with my housemate and finished packing everything I owned to come home and then the following day my parents collected me, we loaded the car and then made the two hour journey back to Middlesbrough.
Now I am going to leave this post here as that is pretty much the end of it.
Until Next Time!
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