issues with exam paper

lightspeed

Hi all I wont say which exam, but I recently sat an exam and much of the material was not what we were taught or prepared for. Some of the questions that did come up were not listed as possible exam questions in some of the lecturers notes.

Quite a few classmates were unhappy with and think they emailed the head of the school to complain, as the lecturer mostly focused on just material from our one course book, even though exam style questions are very different.

None of us felt like we were being taught anything and the lecture just presented information without ever going through exam style questions in class.

Has anybody any experience with this?

I need to get at least 50% overall and think I will need to repeat in August which may or may note endanger my chances of starting a new job in a few months time.

Supercell

Sorry to come across as a bit mean but why should the lecturers go through exam question format in class? Some of mine did and some of them didn't. I looked up previous exams on the online library to familiarise myself with the format. To be honest, I don't think you have a leg to stand on, third level is not secondary school.

lightspeed

Supercell wrote: »

Sorry to come across as a bit mean but why should the lecturers go through exam question format in class? Some of mine did and some of them didn't. I looked up previous exams on the online library to familiarise myself with the format. To be honest, I don't think you have a leg to stand on, third level is not secondary school.

They should go through the exam format so students can be prepared. In this case, it was the first year that two semesters were merged so the format and marking for each question changed quite a bit. In addition, some other areas for some questions that came up in the exam were not covered at all and were not in the prescribed reading material. Also, im aware its not secondary school but dont know what that is supposed to mean? It is actually a postgrad course.

In secondary school, you can see past exam papers and teachers are supposed to teach the examinable material.

It should be the same as with third level exams but it seems that some lecturers are mostly focused on setting an exam paper that wont be subject to criticism from an external examiner, even if they have not taught students the material required to sufficiently prepare for the exams.

Nonoperational

Very rare to be thought everything for a 3rd level exam. I found that usually we were thought enough to pass, the rest was from our own reading around a topic.

stealinhorses

College is not secondary school, there is no LC marking scheme and set ways of asking questions.

kirving

lightspeed wrote: »

None of us felt like we were being taught anything and the lecture just presented information without ever going through exam style questions in class.

If that's the case, there is an element of responsibility on the students to bring this up before the exam.

A similar thing happenned when I was in DIT, with students writing letters after the exam etc, but the reality was that the lecturer was perfectly capable, but people didn't like the subject, didn't work at it when it mattered, and only decided to complain when the exam was harder than they realised.

Not saying that this is the case here, but complaining after the exam does not look good.