I had my fifth and final exam for the term today, and unfortunately, I thought it was just like the four previous ones.

You see, based on the curriculi and the lectures in the courses I’ve been taking this fall, I’ve been expecting to be satisfied with a straight Cs. Global English had a lot of grammar and linguistics, which is a bitch as I’ve never learned to master the metalanguage required for these disciplines. The same goes for English Language Proficiency and Examen Facultatum (or whatever the Hell) Language and Literature. Then there’s the course in Medieval History, which not only focused on social and cultural aspects of the Middle Ages, but also had a kinda tricky methodology part, as well as sections on archaeology, Norse languages, Latin, Medieval music and art. The only one I expected to be even close to easy was English Literature: Drama and poetry, and even that course had some relatively hard-to-learn bits, with a lot of terminology and metres and stuff like this.

Granted, all of these are introductionary courses, and most (all, in fact) of them are designed to be mandatory courses in the first term of a new student. But still: I’ve hardly worked with these courses at all this term, and because the exams have been so easy (unless, of course, I’ve misunderstood all of them and have five nasty surprises coming my way in a couple of weeks time :P ), I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll be disappointed by every grade I get which is below a B.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Because a year or so ago, Loki took an introductionary course in pre-modern history at the University of Bergen, and I seem to remember him being somewhat annoyed at one of the questions he’d been asked during his exams. If my memory serves me right the question I’m thinking of went somewhere along the lines of “Describe the role of the Burgundian Dukes in the development of the French state in the Middle Ages.” When I took the corresponding course here at NTNU in Trondheim, the question we were asked was “How was Medieval culture influenced by the culture of the Germanic invaders of the time of Migration?” Which is such a broad question, you can just about answer anything on it, and still get some things right. In this way, it might be better suited for examinations of this kind, as it allows students to display how much they know by tieing as much as they can to their answers. But the kind of more specific questions UiB asks are probably better fit for nurturing future historians, as it requires more of the students who try to answer it. They’ll have to have a much more thorough knowledge of the Middle Ages to answer properly, and if this is the norm of UiB’s final examinations, they’ll soon learn that they need to know all of their history this well. Whereas we NTNU history students “know” that we’ll be asked such a broad, general question, we only need to know the rough outlines. Which would have been all right if we were talking, you know, high school, but I don’t think it’s equally all right for university standards.

So, what was the question we were asked to answer on the Medieval History exam this term? “Feudalism: What were its roots, how did it function, and how did it develop? And why didn’t it take root in Norway?” as well as auxilliary questions on archaeological material that could be used to highlight the developments in religion and power relations in the Middle Ages (the one I wrote), and on Scandinavian literacy traditions in the Middle Ages. If you don’t think any of these sound very general, trust me when I say they are.

As for the other courses, this may very well be the level of similar courses elsewhere, but I doubt it. Primarily because when my sister saw the questions we were asked for the exam in the Ex.Fac.: Language and Literature course, she became very agitated, because, she said, “If they’d asked this easy questions when I took this course, I wouldn’t have got a bloody B on the literature part.” Apparently, where we were asked to present the features of the lyric genre and to define the terms “topic” and “theme” and to explain the connection between these, she and those she took the course with some four years ago were asked to discuss the differences between two schools of literary theory, whose names were so advanced I am completely unable to remember them. Of course, that was before the Quality reform — in other words before deparments were paid for each student it managed to squeeze through one of its programmes…

Anyhoo, beneficial for me, at least on a short term basis, as I’ll most probably be harvesting Bs shortly. Not Bs to be all that proud of (then again, I’ve only ever been proud of one or two of my Bs, and only one of my three As), but Bs all the same.