Exam Criticised

Apart from the tedium of the course, many students complain about one particular aspect of the assessment process, the 'context test'. This paper must be one of the few at Victoria that includes such a test, where students are expected to recognise two line snippets from among the thousands of lines of poetry dealt with in the course, and to be able to detail 'who is saying what to whom'.

No doubt some of these quotations come at crucial points in the action, but if your familiarity with the text consists of one through reading and four tutorials spent translating odd passages, you are almost inevitably going to fall on your face. The only successful way to swot for this test would seem to be to learn every set text by heart, which is a little much to expect when a course has a reading load that is not exactly light.

It is perhaps a bit unfair on the department to offer such criticism through the pages of Salient rather than at a more personal level; I do this for two reasons. Firstly, I've got to stay on good terms with them if I intend to complete a degree there. Secondly, everyone I meet says 'Salient doesn't have enough student based articles in it.' Here is a student based article. Why not write one yourself?

Hende Nicolaus