exams and committees

I took an absolute beating today on behalf of the co-ordinating academic for a subject I'm teaching.

He's away on leave to spend time with his kids, and left me with a very rough version of the final exam to present to the exam committee this morning. The exam committee is basically a collection of the more senior academics who present the exams they've written to each other for scrutiny to ensure clarity of content and instructions. So not only am I totally out of my depth already, but I'm also ill-equipped with what even I can tell is a scrappy exam paper...

So myself and a colleague did some minor editorial work before the meeting, but we weren't sure how much jurisdiction we had on our own, and neither of us have ever written formal exam papers before, so we didn't make any major changes.

And the paper was totally slammed in the meeting. As they were going through it suggesting changes I was just placing asterisks in the document to remind me to flag each questionable section to my co-ordinator, and about half way though one person suggested I just put one big asterisk on the front page and send the whole paper back for revision. At this point I just got the giggles, which relieved the tension in the room, and then everyone else started laughing because it was just so dreadful, and began making jokes about shooting the messenger and sending me back to my co-ordinator with some sample exam questions so he can model the paper on something decent.

I hope for the sake of my students that this exam paper ends up in better shape.