A Note On Final Exams

*I haven't gotten a chance to write up my Burkina Faso adventures yet, but here is something to hold you over until then. I wrote this right after my first exam and just forgot to post it until now. I am alive and well and back in Ghana, and will try to post about Burkina asap.*

A Note On Final Exams

Last Monday I had my first exam here at the University and it pretty much worked out like most things here, not anything like it was supposed to, but nothing was really wrong with how it happened.

First off, you only know the date and time of your exam, not the location. The location isn't posted until a day or two before, for reasons I'm still not fully sure about. So on Sunday I went hunting for the location of my exam and and it wasn't anywhere on any of the venue sheets. So I panicked, worried about having missed my final and called my program director. For whatever reason my test location wasn't put on the sheet, but it was still happening and luckily my director found out where.

Second odd thing: My professor said there would be six questions on the exam and we had to choose three. There were five questions, not six, which doesn't matter that much, except it really gives you less choices that are kind of necessary.

Third: The professor said there would be two questions on AIDS/HIV, there was one, and it wasn't even really a question on what she talked about in class.

Fourth: There also was supposed to be two questions on what could be done in the future to stop the spread of AIDS. This question was mixed with the only one question about AIDS and she asked why people didn't have better behavior about protecting themselves from AIDS, despite the knowledge being provided. We never once discussed that in class.

Fifth: The professor GUARANTEED that there would be the question “why is the AIDS rate so much higher among heterosexual couples than homosexual couples?” We talked about this at length the last day of class and I was well prepared to answer it. The question was nowhere on the exam.

So when it all came down to it, one of the questions I had prepared wasn't there, and she also gave us one less option, plus combining what should have been four different questions into one. I was still able to find three questions I could answer, but the whole thing was just so odd and so different from anything in the states.

I'll be interested to see how the next three go.