Who typed these things up??

Day 21 – May 26

Term exams began today but they got off to a rocky start. For some reason, the exam papers were not ready and the headmaster had to go to town in the morning to get them. He had gone yesterday (Sunday) as well, but the office was closed (naturally), and the promise was that they’d be ready early this morning. Why they were being done at the last minute is beyond me. The original date to submit the exams for printing was the 16th of May. So either the printers had them for a long, long time or the headmaster got lazy and didn’t put them in until the end of next week. As Mr. Nazari put it succinctly as we waited for the exams to arrive, “We Tanzanians are very good at making policy but not so good at implementation.”

So the students came to school prepared to write their English exam and then had to sit and wait for over an hour and a half. That has to be unsettling if you’re trying to keep yourself in your exam mindset. It wasn’t really fair to the students. Finally, at about 9:30, the headmaster pulled up in a taxi with the box of tests. You’d think everything would be then be fine, but that wasn’t the case.

As we went to divide up the tests to take to the various classes, it was discovered that not enough of the Form II English exams were printed, so they couldn’t write it. Instead, the Form Is got underway around 10am. As I looked over the section of the exam for which I submitted questions, I was appalled at the typographical errors throughout. In one paragraph, a dictionary entry, I had to make 4 critical corrections. Another section of the test had three critical errors. And despite the fact that it was sent to either a board office or a printing company, none of it was done on computer – it was all done by typewriter (or some kind of stenograph machine).

The Form Is had 2 hours for an exam that really only needed one. I was overseeing the IB class and almost had to bust a student for cheating – it was border-line. Instead, I just kept an eagle eye on him and the questionable activity subsided. Afterwards, I made quick work of marking my questions on the exam for the two classes. On one question the students performed well, and on the other poorly. Better resources and a little more time would have seen better results on the second question, I think.

In the afternoon session, I presided over the Form IIA class during their mathematics exam. They were very well behaved, so there wasn’t much for me to do. Again, the typographical errors in the exam were horrendous. These kids, the equivalent of grade 9s, had been studying quadratic equations. The teacher had submitted an original with the question “Solve t2 + 6t + 8 = 0”, easy enough for them to do, but it came printed as “Solve t^^2 + 6^t +8 = 0” – a considerably harder equation requiring knowledge of logarithms! Fortunately, we were able to find all the errors and make them known to the students.

The rest of the week promises to hold more of the same. I don’t mind invigilating the exams, but I had thought I’d be able to get a bit of reading done. It doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case, as I spend all my time watching the students for cheating.