Becoming the examiner

From a very early age I have always had an enormous interest in learning, with certain preferences admittedly, but with a general appetite for almost every field, not only for practical purpose, but also as subject of conversation. Being able to provide surprising piece of trivia is always a good icebreaker, particularly if you know how to read the audience and avoid becoming a nag.

However, in all the years through school, high school and even university I have always maintained a terrible dread for exams. The strongest contribution to my fear was the suspicion that all my work in the last few months could go for nothing if I had "bad luck" in the exam. Of course, the more confident I was in the exam, the less I had to rely on "luck" (because I was ready to answer correctly anything that they could throw at me), but it is always to grow your confidence (i.e. study) subjects that are of your liking than the other ones.

Photo: Alberto G.

It has been now around 15 years since I made my last exam, but I still remember them with a churn of my stomach. However, thanks to a momentous joke of destiny, I have now been asked to assist in the correction of one of the exams that the department has conducted on the undergraduate studies. I have to admit that the idea of retaliation crossed my mind for a second, but then I realized that awarding surprisingly low marks in just a subset of the students (I am correcting around 25 out of 100) would not only be unfair but also fire the alarms, so I discarded it summarily.

So now, here I am with the exams of 25 students and the answers, so I am carefully poring through their answers one at a time and reliving in my mind the moments of anguish or delight that I went through when I was the one being examined. In some cases I just answered with absolute confidence and without any hint of doubt. On the other extreme, there were occasions (very few, but not zero) where I would not know where to start to look for an answer. But the majority of questions ranged between trying to baloney my way to get some points, to having a decent knowledge but not enough to capture all the nuances of the question. 

Seeing the answers in the exams I strongly empathize with the students and feel a pang of remorse every time I have to deduct some points because they forgot to write the units of the answer, the forgot to carry one in the addition or they oversaw a piece of information in the problem statement. The fact is that I also feel a certain spark of joy every time I can give a student full points for an answer, even if I have not given the lectures. In summary, it is quite an emotional experience even if I am now the examiner and not the examined anymore. And all that is without having ever met the students in person (or via Zoom); I cannot imagine what it must have been for our high school teachers to correct our exams after spending so many ours with us in class, knowing what piques our interests, where we falter, where we shine.

Now I have to get back to my corrections, because I will also be examined (to a certain extent) on timely delivery of the marks, so I had better not be late. Enjoy the weekend and see you on Monday.