Bane of my existence

There is one day each semester that I despise more than any other, and have freely deemed it to be the bane of my existence.  It’s only taken me a year to determine that this is a recurring event, so clearly, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but now that I know, I can prepare adequately.

The day is the Merging of the Exams.  UCU oversees several regional colleges, and as such, we review their theology exam questions.  I do have to say that as a former student and an instructional designer, I find this somewhat horrifying:  we are changing exam questions for lectures that we have not heard.  As an instructional designer, I know that the lecturer should follow the syllabus, and that our oversight is/should be a good thing, but still, I get a little apoplectic each time we conduct this exercise.

This semester, we were reviewing questions submitted by three schools.  So, the dean hands out the submitted questions by area of expertise for us to review.  Where there there is overlap in the courses, we merge the exams, so that the students in a given course are all answering the same questions.  Each envelope is either a course or a program; I don’t know how clear the stack of paper the dean is sorting through, but it’s quite a bit of work.

Who do you think gets to make the corrections and do all the merging?  Yours truly, the fastest fingers in Uganda.

Since I do the typing, I don’t necessarily get to do a lot of the correction, which is unfortunate. It’s actually somewhat fun, seeing what the lecturers have set for questions.  Sometimes, the questions are too big for the diploma (associate’s degree) or certificate (I don’t know the equivalent for this; less than an associate’s), so we reframe them.  The dean gave us the guidance that if the question is a hen, cut it down to a neck or a thigh.

Merging exams is pretty much an all-day activity, and it took me a couple hours of typing and organizing the soft copy files the next day.

I took this photo of the table to try to show the volume of paper that’s sorted (and that I end up changing), and someone asked me what I was doing.  I said I was taking the picture as proof for the people at home that I actually work.  They said that there must be a photo of me, so here you go.