Monday 26 November 2007

AQA Examinations.

Exams, the most crucial part of a students "career". However it is also the most boring and tediously exhausting part. So when that Exam finally finishes you get to go home, put your feet up and relax. Well not in Temple Moor.

Though we are partial to praise and it's always nice to be praised. There are some times when you simply can't be arsed. Last week and this week, year 11s and a few year 10s have been taking part in GCSE Mocks. And so far the end of every test, pupils have to sit an extra 10 minutes being told how good they are. Aren't you normally kept back for being bad?
The latest culprit being the headmaster (we refuse to call him principle) who gave us an unnecessary pat on the back.
We do however congratulate you if you have been taking an exam this week. Our congratulations is better as you're not being kept 10 minutes in a cold sports hall while waiting to go home.

Now onto the actual tests. The school doesn't appear to want to create its own tests for the mocks. Instead it decides to steal previous papers to use. However this means they usually contain subjects we haven't yet covered. This leads to some tests being annoyingly hard. However tests being too hard is not where AQA fail. No it's when they make the tests too easy. Resulting in the rather Epic Lulz.
An example of this is the IT paper pupils sat today. It was 1 hour 30 for foundation and 2 hour for Higher. However with these questions, it made little difference.
Most questions were multi choice. Tick what you thought was the correct statement. Pretty simple. But not as simple minded as the people who come up with the choices. One question was asking about RFIDs or Radio Frequency Identification Devices. Pretty tricky if you haven't done them yet like our class, unless you were lucky enough to make a comic about RFIDs as apart of your revision. However actual knowledge about RFIDs isn't needed when one of the choices face with is "If you get too many RFIDs together they will create an Evil Network".
Another question was talking about a mapping software called SeeEarth, which is not a total rip of GoogleEarth at all. The specific question was asking why Police couldn't use it to catch criminals. Of course the correct answer has to be "The Crooks might have umbrellas so can't be seen".

This isn't a plea for hard papers. Oh no no. We got a few laughs out of this IT one. But instead we'd like less Rubbish in the questions. And also we'd like questions that isn't rambling nonsense.

In summery: More laughs and less Rubbish in test papers please. And can we please go straight home after an exam. Not wait 10 Minutes.

On a final note to the AQA exam board. The school website can also be a source for 3 year old information like ours is.

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