(I know! Kinda makes it easier to accept that I only got a D on the ex.fac. course I took — Language and Literature — but seeing as I didn’t really read much in that course until the night before the exam, and lost a lot of lectures, I’m not bothered overly much by that grade anyway. I’ve got an OK grip on the concepts we went through in the course, even though I don’t exactly master them, and I’ll get a lot of it expanded upon in the English courses I’ll be taking this term, so I don’t really care. Would of course have been nice with a C, but meh.)

(And wow, that IS very good!)

… but they were only 7,5 points courses to begin with!

Excepting the history course (I aced it, by the way! Of the 23 people who passed, I was one of only two to get an A! ), which could have been cut to a 10 pointer if they also cut a few hundred pages of curriculum — after all, there were 1,500 of them — and if NTNU operated with 10 points courses. (Which they probably should.)

Yeah, I guess you’re right. I was a bit upset after my last exam, and so I wrote this post in affect. Not a good thing, that.

“It’s (as a rule of thumb, in my experience) not the questions on the exam or the knowledge needed to answer them there’s something wrong with, but the amount of work you need to put in in front of them.”

True. Which is funny in regards to the Quality Reform, seeing as that reform was *supposed* to make us work more, by giving us more papers and shorter time to do courses and stuff like that. But as it is, at least here in Trondheim, while they started out pretty good by giving is two large term papers in all 15 points courses (one ten pager, one fifteen pager which was graded and counted as part of our exams), they fell off their horse pretty early on, possibly because of the new financing system or some such, and in a couple of the courses I took this fall we only had one short paper, if any at all, because they couldn’t afford to pay Master level students the peanuts they get for correcting papers.

Meh, I say. Meh. (There’s supposed to be an exclamation mark here, after that last “Meh”, but I felt too apathetic to type it.)

Gods, no. It was something like “describe how Burgundy is telling for the stae.forming tendencies in Europe in the Middle Age” or something like that. Very wide topic with a narrower opening-door, and it was on the detail-quiz part of the exam. (You get five short onestesting your knowledge of the curriculum’s detailsby putting them in perspective, and choose three, on which you spend about an hour and a half (is the intention). Then you get two large ones (should take about 4 hours) and choose one, these point directly at the big topics and which smaller ones to illustrate with is thus up to the candidate. And only reason I complained about that assignment was ’cause the curriculum, as far as I can tell, never mentioned Burgundy specifically. Otherwise it was a fine, fair question.

Yeah, the quality-reform sucks on many levels - but you still need to know details to get good grades, no matter how the questions are phrased. If you get B’s, well, then, you do. As for knowing more details, you get that at 200-levels, which you have to have in a bachelor’s anyway, plus at the more in-depth courses at 100-level. Introductory-courses are introductory. I’m in general all for dissing the quality-reform, but I feel like you’re doing it on faulty terms. It’s (as a rule of thumb, in my experience) not the questions on the exam or the knowledge needed to answer them there’s something wrong with, but the amount of work you need to put in in front of them. I’m guessing they should’ve cut each of those courses you took with 5 studiepoeng at the very least, to force you to add to your workload.