Timetable Chaos

mloc

Once again the exams office has made a total balls of the exam timetable, most 4th year science students have been royally screwed... examples being Physiology have 9 finals in 5 days, Biochemistry have 4 days of 2 in a row (e.g. 8 exams in 4 days), chemistry have all 4 exams in 3 days, some joint honours students have two exam running at the same time.

If someone doesn't lose thier job over both the delay in getting the timetables out and the utter balls they've made of them, it proves how utterly down the drain UCD administration is going.

robotfridge

i agree. Im 2nd arts and ive 6 exams in 5 days straight.
50% of my degree is this year. Great

rainbow kirby

Same ****, different year tbh.

Tan Princess

They seem to have the last week given over to repeats. Surely they should be first giving the people doing exams for the first time more time to study?

dirtydress

^ Exactly! I would have thought they would push finals as far back as possible to give us the most time to prepare...guess that was asking too much and those who failed once get treated by the system.

Stepherunie

You're non modularised therefore you're just an anomaly (no offence meant by this btw, i'm non modularised too).

Though what do you expect when the bloody Academic council think that this is the last year when they will have non modularised students?!?!?! Have they forgotten all about 4 and 5 year degrees???

katarin

mloc wrote:

If someone doesn't lose thier job over both the delay in getting the timetables out and the utter balls they've made of them, it proves how utterly down the drain UCD administration is going.

i dont think thats fair.
its only a provisional timetable. it can change. and considering the chaos the exams office have to sift through with the all-over-the-place horizons degree, i think the fact that a timetable was drawn up at all is a major feat - have you seen the amount of subjects that have to be catered for? bar going through every single student in the college by name and subject and creating personalised timetables, theres not much else they could have done. i know its ****, its my final year and my timetables not great, but when are exams ever ideal?

mloc

katarin wrote:

i dont think thats fair.
its only a provisional timetable. it can change. and considering the chaos the exams office have to sift through with the all-over-the-place horizons degree, i think the fact that a timetable was drawn up at all is a major feat - have you seen the amount of subjects that have to be catered for? bar going through every single student in the college by name and subject and creating personalised timetables, theres not much else they could have done. i know its ****, its my final year and my timetables not great, but when are exams ever ideal?

Why is everyone in UCD so accepting of pathetic standards?

There is an Exams department. It is thier responsibility to organise exams. There is several staff DEDICATED to this task.

Exams come at the same time every year. They have access to all neccessary information. The horizons system was implemented two years ago. It was not a suprise this year. There are finite number of exams to be set, and a finite number of available dates and locations. It is by no means an impossible task.

Final years student should be accomated first and foremost, as these coming exams represent their degree mark. Instead, it would seem, they were treated as an afterthought. The timetable was released three weeks late, with no solid explaination.

Explain to me exactly how that does not constitute a level of utter incompetence?

katarin

im not saying they deserve an award, just that their job isnt the easiest.

Red Alert

it wouldn't be easy for me to do a job i'm incompetent to do.

emeraldstar

katarin wrote:

i dont think thats fair.
its only a provisional timetable. it can change.

exactly!! it's only a 'provisional' timetable. At this stage of the year it should be a pretty final version of where we're supposed to be in less than 3 weeks time.

emeraldstar

emeraldstar wrote:

in less than 3 weeks time.

I'm really happy all my exams are on campus in Trinity this year. I remember going out to the RDS last year (took a year off last year) and seeing random Trinity students in one section, UCD students in another section, and the accountants something or other having their exams in another section of it! There were clumps of very confused students everywhere to be seen...

So for anyone who will be out in the RDS this year, remember this simple rule: Our invigilators wear cloaks.

Life was so much simpler for everyone else when you guys weren't modularised!

pretty*monster

I'm begning to come around to the idea that in-house exams would be a much better idea.

FionnMatthew

3rd Arts, G&RCiv & Philosophy.
All 10 exams in 8 days.

14th - 1 exam
15th - day off
16th - 2 exams
17th - 1 exam
18th - 1 exam
19th - 1 exam
20th - sunday off
21st - 2 exams
22st - 2 exams

All of my finals in just over a week. Thanks a bunch UCD. Evidently, you have a whole lot of respect for us. Admin deserves a Cho Seung-hui for this.

Vorsprung

FionnMatthew wrote:

Admin deserves a Cho Seung-hui for this.

You wanna think about that one again? That's seriously ****ed up.

I had a big exam today, a clinical worth 40% of Psychiatry, one of my final subjects. Not sure whether it was in-house or Exams Office run, but it started about 40 minutes late and there was little information during the exam (and I don't mean they didn't give us the answers!). No summer exams per se for me, just another clinical at the end of June.

FionnMatthew

bigjimthefirst wrote:

You wanna think about that one again? That's seriously ****ed up.

So did the exams office.

tribulus

I have two languages clashing at the same time.

Has anyone got an email address to contact the Exams Office with, I know they said it will be sorted automatically but quite frankly I don't trust them at all to sort it.

I'm also semi-modularised (whatever that means) so I again am not very hopeful.

FionnMatthew

Assessment & Logistics Unit
University College Dublin
Belfield
Dublin 4

Tel: +353-1-716-1555
Fax: +353-1-716-1198
Email: assessment@ucd.ie

Notorious

One of my classes isn´t listed at all! Why could they not just sort out the timetable earlier, say release a provisional timetable during March and start sorting out the mistakes from there. Trinity have their timetable around two weeks now, and their exams start after ours.

snickerpuss

3 of my exams are still not there.
Irish don't seem remotely bothered to fix it.
I got "Ah sure it'll all be grand, i'm sure you'll know when you have them before they start".

I just want to know when and where my exams are, its not that mad a question. I can see this not getting fixed for quite a while considering it took them from Sep-Feb to fix my registration problem.

dajaffa

robotfridge wrote:

i agree. Im 2nd arts and ive 6 exams in 5 days straight.
50% of my degree is this year. Great

No this year either counts for 33% counting your best 6 modules of the year, or 50% of all your modules this year. Which one it is depends on how you do next year, with your degree weighted whichever way is better for you.

mloc

Just got an email, all 4th science are going in-house.

Guess that sums up the incompetence of the exams office. The Science office is basically fed up of them, and we have been advised to ignore the exam's offices timetable's from now on as Science will be publishing thier own.

edit:

Just to like to add, fair play to the Science office and our lecturers for not putting up with it.

tribulus

No sign of an email for me

My 2nd year Summer exams were much less stressful when they were in the Science block, same seat every time and same rather hot invigilator for when you can't think of an answer!

emeraldstar

dajaffa wrote:

No this year either counts for 33% counting your best 6 modules of the year, or 50% of all your modules this year. Which one it is depends on how you do next year, with your degree weighted whichever way is better for you.

What??!!!!
did they change it? We were told a few months ago that this year and next year were 50-50 but only our six best modules of this year were to be counted......they can't change that without informing us?!!! noooooo

Stepherunie

SU rowed a lot with the admin about your year because they felt it was unfair that you'd only been informed after the year began of your degree weighting so they agreed for it to be changed.

Can't believe they didn't bother to tell you.

emeraldstar

Stepherunie wrote:

SU rowed a lot with the admin about your year because they felt it was unfair that you'd only been informed after the year began of your degree weighting so they agreed for it to be changed.

Can't believe they didn't bother to tell you.

they did tell us it had been changed for our year only, so that only our six best modules would count for the 50%
but dajaffa's post seemed to imply that it had been again changed since then so that now all 12 modules count as 50%..or alternatively 6 counting as 33%
I'm so confused now!!

Stepherunie

Hmm I think they way Dajaffa is saying it is this:

You do 12 modules this year (I think)

They'll take your best six results from those 12.

Next year when you've finished your third year exams they'll take your best 6 results then too.

Then your 2nd year results will account for either 33% of your final degree mark or 50% of your final degree mark,with the other 66% or 50% respectively coming from your third year results. Basically they use the weighting that gives you a higher degree mark overall.

emeraldstar

huh. that's quite different to what we were told, and on which i was basing my progress.... ****e

Stepherunie

Now that's what I think it is. I'm not in arts so ask at the programme office mayhaps???

That's what i've gleamed from council or somewhere or other.

Blut

No, thats completely wrong. Youre doing 12 modules in second year, the top 6 of these will count towards your degree. These 6 modules will be equally weighted with the 12 third year modules. Your degree will be averaged out from these 18 modules.

That means your top 6 second year modules are effectively one third of your degree. This is the situation in arts anyway, I cant comment for other faculties.

emeraldstar

i thought the top 6 were one half of the degree.

whoops

but that's what I got from this, which we got around the start of this semester:

Further to our recent communication regarding the calculation of your GPA, please note the following amendment, which has been agreed is to the greater benefit of current Stage 2 students:

1. Your GPA will be calculated over BOTH Stages 2 and 3 on a 50/50 basis - on the 6 best module grades from Stage 2 and all module grades in Stage 3, weighted evenly. This one-off arrangement applies to students currently in Stage 2 only.

So did they change it since and not inform us, or have I understood it wrong? If it's the former, that is unacceptable; if the latter, whoops again