After two weeks of doing basically nothing at work, it was nice to be assigned to proctor exams. The trouble was the exam schedule was completely in Arabic, so I wasn't really clear where I was supposed to be or when. I asked for help to find out where I needed to be, and when, which was good, since it turned out I was reading the schedule backwards. Since it is all right to left, the morning shift is where I though the afternoon shift was. I would have shown up in the right place at the wrong time, that is if I could have found the place. None of the lecture halls are labeled, but since everyone else who works here seems to know where they all are, it didn't appear to be a problem for them. I asked someone where the Al Farabi hall was, and they looked at me like I was crazy for not knowing. Then they just vaguely mentioned downstairs and gestured off to the left.
Never one to pass up an adventure, I went off to find it. Going downstairs is more of an ordeal then it sounds. There is a staircase that leads directly down, but since a section of that floor is used by the men in the management offices, if you want to go downstairs without your Abaya on, you first have to go upstairs to the third floor to by-pass that section of the second floor with men on it, and then down on the other side all the way to the first floor. So after all that, I ended up downstairs but still lost. I followed the girls rushing around looking panicked, and sure enough, they led me to a large lecture hall, and sure enough, there was a familiar English teacher who welcomed me, so I figured I was in the right place.
There were over 100 chairs all in neat rows. The girls were instructed to leave their bags and cell phones at the front of the room and take only a pen or pencil. Most were good about following this rule, but some had to be asked more than once to put their phones or bags away. The first exam was two hours long, and even though most of them finished in 30 minutes, they had to stay put until an hour and 15 minutes in. I imagine it was as much torture for them as it was for me to be pacing up and down. There were about 10 teachers assigned to watch the students and be sure there was no cheating, and make sure the ID's matched the number the students wrote on the exams. Since there are no pictures on the ID's for modesty reasons, one assumes that the student is who she says she is.
The first day of proctoring, was sort of exciting, but, after two weeks of it, including Saturdays, I was pretty much over it. I think I only survived the boredom because I got smart after the fist day, and started wearing my hijab so that I could have in earphones and no one would notice. I was able to finish the whole audiobook of "Stranger in a Strange Land" and got about half-way through Peter Pan.
Which isn't to say there weren't some exciting moments. During one session, someone forgot to turn the ringer off on their phone, but it kept ringing and ringing and ringing, so we teachers had to search through the pile of bags to try to find the offending phone so it wouldn't keep distracting everyone. Another time, a girl got ill, and we had to rush her off to the bathroom. Even though she had nearly finished, because she left the room early, her test was disqualified and she had to take the whole thing again later. Interestingly, there is nothing to stop you from arriving to the test late. Many girls didn't bother showing up until 30 or even 45 minutes into the testing period. Which is all well and good if they don't need the whole time to finish the test. But at the end of one test (in fact, 5 min. after the end of one test) I literally got into a tug of war with a girl who had arrived late, and didn't finish, and was now in tears, trying to tear her paper out of my hands when I tried to collect it. I might have had more sympathy for her if I hadn't seen her chatting in the hallway before the test, so I knew she wasn't late because of her driver or anything truly unavoidable.
The most frustrating part about the whole deal for me though was the contradictions inherent in the whole system. They seem to go out of their way to make the exams appear to be fair and make it impossible to cheat, but in the end, they find ways to cheat themselves. Here is an example. The students did extremely poorly on the English Exams, and by extremely important, I mean, less than half of the students received a passing mark. Since the mid-term exam is 20% of the final grade, and the final exam is 60%, that didn't leave much hope that many of them would pass. The solution? Well, we certainly can't offer extra tutoring or more classes, or anything as sensible and educationally sound as all that. No, instead, we had to give them all another "very very easy" test, to boost their scores. Yup, lower the standards. That's definitely how we should be training the women who will someday be doing root canals and open heart surgery.
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