14.12.06 EXAMS ARE DONE!

Exams are done. Yahoo!!! I believe I passed all of them. Finance, Statistics, and Economics, oddly, were the best. Probably because I had (mostly) never seen them before coming here, and spent lots of time on them. Organisational Behaviour was OK, Strategy was lame but passable, and Accounting was probably passable too. HOWEVER, the big point here is that I am done, and without any overt, stare at the page, freak out and hyperventilate disasters. We don't get our grades until mid February, so the proof will come then.

Exams here are totally totally weird. First, you have to wear subfusc, which sounds charming until you think about sitting for an exam wearing a tuxedo. For many hours at a time, four days in a row. Now imagine 214 monumentally stressed out people wearing tuxes for four days in a row, and that most of them DON'T OWN FOUR WHITE SHIRTS. That's right: funky subfusc. Not so damn charming now, is it?

Next, since we are MBAs and on the lowest rung of the totem pole, we don't get to go to the cool old 19th century official exam schools, we get to go to some 70s building in an Oxford suburb called Summertown. This means riding the bus, and also means hanging around in Summertown during the 3 or so hours between exams. Imagine 214 tuxedoed, stressed out, pushy MBAs all trying to cram in that last bit of studying in your quaint little coffee shop. We actually got kicked out of one for loitering. The exam schools won't let us sit in their building either, we get kicked out promptly after each exam. Further, all exams are done in pen, even math exams. What a pain. There are no notes to help you out, just you and your pen and your tuxedo. Add to this that you are not allowed to use your own calculator, but have to use a shitty one provided by the exam school. One guy, I SHIT YOU NOT, had a screwed up one in the row behind me, and every number came out in something like 10 digit exponential form. It was unusable, especially since these calculators only have 3 rows. He had to do all his crazy finance calculations by hand. In pen. The attitude of the exam school staff was, "you should know how to use our calculator". They even made an announcement about it at the end of the class, telling us to come to their "calculator seminar" next time. Poor fucking guy. I lost about 3 minutes from my test just feeling shitty for him. Exam school officials constantly pace the aisles checking and rechecking your ID (which must be sitting on the desk) every few minutes. The exam school concept is, I believe (Andy, correct me here) many hundreds of years old. Their big point is that there is no possible human way you could cheat, and that your papers get graded with total anonymity between students and profs... you just put a number on the booklet, never a name. Exam school staff are very picky about when you may stand, sit, drink water, go to the bathroom, etc. They dismiss us in rows, and yell at us not to speak until out of the building. They congratulate us when we get our exams all in the right slots after the test, and when we empty the room quickly without talking. They also hassle people for not wearing proper subfusc on the way in and out of the exam hall. Apparently, you can get turned away for not wearing it, but I haven't seen that happen. One really big fat guy reads from a pamphlet all about what to do, not to do, how long the exam is, etc., and then says "go". On the first day of exams, the fat guy told us that we didn't have to wear subfusc, there were several other universities in the UK that didn't require it and we were more than welcome to go to them instead of Oxford. The professor is present in the hall, just in case there is an error in the test, or something needs clarification. The have to wear subfusc too, but they get these bigger, fancier robes that are much more Dracula-like and even have a red hood. I've never seen a prof with his hood up, but it may happen in some secret rituals or whatever.

Ok, now it's time to get loaded with the MBAs.

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