The time has come.
FINAL EXAMS.
dun dun DUNNNNN.
After a week of relentlessly studying Its time to show what I’ve learned throughout this entire semester. I’ve gone through my first exams and man, these guys take their final exams pretty seriously. It went a little bit like this:
Everyone in the class silently shuffles into the room. The room has many rows with test packets placed so there is an empty seat placed in between every test packet. there are also empty rows in between the rows to allow optimal no cheating spacing students. I drop my backpack off in the front of the room, taking only our school ID, our drink bottles, and multiple pens to write with. I take a seat somewhere in front of a test packet and wait for the exam to start. The exam begins at exactly 2:15 pm and there’s a giant clock on the screen in the middle of the room that lets us know exactly when it hits 2:15 pm. The class watches each second pass and at exactly 2:15:00 the test conductor presses play on the audio file on the computer.
A woman’s voice comes on and begins telling instructions to the test, and even though its nice kiwi accent I still can’t help but feel like I’m in the nominations for the 75th Hunger Games. Cell phones must be turned off, no other writing utensils but pens are allowed, no talking during the test, no writing on your body or clothes, if you need to use the restroom raise your hand and someone will accompany you to the bathroom, if any of these rules are broken disciplinary actions can be taken and there may be fines.
We are given some time to write our name, school ID number, class code and title, and the date twice on the front sheet. Once on the regular cover of the answer booklet, and again on a small tear away piece of paper that is part of the cover. At 2:20 pm we are given 10 minutes to read over all the exam questions. No writing or marking the paper, just reading. And I learned the hard way that you can’t be holding a pen either. An exam proctor had to come over to me and tell me to put my pen down because I had been holding it. She also had to look through my booklet to make sure I didn’t write anything down. At exactly 2:30 pm the exam started and we are allowed to begin writing.
The exam is three hours long and for both of my exams I took up almost the whole three hours. It’s quite a bit when you’ve never experienced a test like this before in your life. My hand got a little sore from writing even. I felt both of them went alright and I’m pretty satisfied with how I feel about them. My first one was for Terrestrial Ecology, and the second one was Advanced Genetics.
Usually, I would be more worried about advanced genetics but we were given a guideline for what to study for advanced genetics and knew what kind of questions would be on the test. As for Terrestrial, there was not much of a guideline and he just said to study the main ideas which really comprises all of the material for the semester. This made me a lot more anxious about the terrestrial exam. In the end, the terrestrial exam was challenging but not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Though we will see how I did when I get the results back two weeks after the semester ends.
After my exams end I will be hanging around Hamilton for a little while longer and saying goodbye to all my friends who are here on exchange and are returning back home. A week after that it will be my turn to depart on a week-long journey around the Coromandel part of the north island. Still, I have a lot of planning to do for this trip but I’m excited. It’s going to be with one friend of mine who I met during one of my classes and we’ll be traveling in a camper van for six days, hiking and hitting up popular spots around the Coromandel.
So far I know I want to do this 7-8 hour day hike called the Pinnacles hike, Cathedral Cove which is where they shot a scene for Narnia, and Hot Water beach where you can dig a hole into the sand to get to some natural thermal springs where you can hang out in the naturally heated pool. This feels like a perfect way to end my time here in Aotearoa and its the perfect thing to look forward to.
