[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]So you’ve settled into the daily life of being a university student. You’re finally comfortable on campus and the exams start. You’ve never experienced this before and it could cause some anxiety. Let us ease you anxious feelings and enlighten you on how tests and exams work.
Tests and exams at university work similarly to those at school, and yet at the same time, totally different. For starters, most of your tests at university are written at night. Oftentimes you will have a normal day of lectures and tutorials, and finish, at say, 3pm. You may only write your test that evening at 7, 8 or even 9pm. Of course, some of the less formal tests are just written during lecture times or during a tutorial session, but just as often you will find yourself sitting in a 2-hour test from 7-9 on a Friday evening.
Also different to high school days is that most tests are written in exam-like conditions, i.e. hundreds of students in a single venue, complete silence, invigilators present, test scripts handed out with customized answer booklets (which have plagiarism declarations and formal identification checks). You are required to give proof of identification, usually just your student card, ID or driver’s licence (this is to stop others writing tests and exams on your behalf). So as you can see, tests are taken far more seriously than in high school.
Exams work in a much similar way, but are even more formalized. The exam timetables for each course are available on the relevant university’s online student portal months before you write them. These are always ‘preliminary’, but seldom change (university admin departments presumably just label them ‘preliminary’to cover themselves in case of extraordinary circumstances).
The venues for exams are typically much larger than those for tests, and more than one exam is written at the same time- For example Chemistry 1 and Economics 3 might be written in the same venue and time to conserve efficiency (some universities are 30 000 students large or more). Sometimes clashes may occur (someone doing Chemistry 1 and Economics 3 in the same semester), though this is rare, as the timetables are usually structured such that only polar opposite courses are written at the same time- you’d be hard-pressed to find a student doing a Science faculty course like Chemistry and a Commerce faculty course like Economics at the same time.
Though it is drilled into you from the moment you step foot on a university campus till the day you leave, it remains worthy of mention here that cheating and plagiarism at university are absolute must-not’s. People get worldwide bans from academic institutions for just jokingly looking at a friend’s test script in a casual day test. People get blacklisted from professional qualifications for just one paragraph of unreferenced work in an essay. The days of ‘teaming up’ with your best friend to crack a pass grade in a high school test are over from the moment you step on campus. It’s often pretty scary, but I’ve never known or even heard of anyone to be convicted of academic wrongdoing when they were not in fact guilty, so provided you aren’t intentionally doing anything wrong, you should never have something to fret over.
Also, university tests and exams are at least ten times as difficult as the toughest test you’ve ever written in high school. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but not studying is simply not an option.
FundiConnect 2cents
I know this all sounds very intense and probably hasn’t put your worries to rest. The more you think it over and let it settle in your mind, the more it’ll seem okay. Just make peace with the fact that things are very intense and everything is taken seriously. So no more facial language exchanges with your bestie.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
