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Last Monday I had two more exams. I had not managed to spent nearly as much of the weekend cramming, and I think it showed. In the morning was French, translating English > French, and responding to written works. The translation was pretty tough, and I definitely regretted not having refreshed some of the trickier grammar constructs. There were then two essays on works of literature. On "Les Mains Sales" I wrote about the character of Hoederer in his capacity as a man of politics, and for L'Etranger I wrote about the reasons for the high level of detail in the description of Meursault's mother's death and funeral.
I was much happier with these (which is good, because between them they're worth five times as many marks as the translation). In terms of content my answers were fairly prosaic, but they answered the question, had a coherent thread, and used plenty of specific examples from the text to back up my assertions, which at this level is really all they expect. A significant portion of the marks come from the range of both vocabulary and grammatical strucutres used, at which point my complete inability to construct a thought with fewer than half a dozen subclauses becomes an asset, at least as long as I'm able to turn those complex thoughts into comprehensible French, which I think I managed.
I finished about 40 minutes early, and decided that those minutes would be more useful to me as extra revision time for the afternoon's exam than double checking the translation, so I left and pored over my RS notes over sushi in a nearby restaurant.
The second exam was Ethics and Religion, and definitely my weakest so far. Unlike in Philosophy of Religion, where I felt confident that I was answering all the questions with solid material from the course, there were a couple this time in which I was definitely winging it. Fortunately, those were also the questions with the fewest marks available, so I'm hopeful that I won't have missed out on too much. Also, we were interrupted by a fire alarm (caused by a malfunction rather than an actual fire), which meant having to stand outside for half an hour in the middle of the exam. I suspect that this may turn out to be to my benefit for a few reasons - one is that we essentially got an extra half hour of thinking time, which may well have improved my answers slightly when we got back in, and the other is that the centre have asked that we all get special consideration because of the disruption, which I think basically translates to "if you're right on the grade boundary, you might get bumped up".
One exam left to go, on Monday, which is on Christianity, about which I feel reasonably confident in my knowledge. I still want to do some last minute revision over the weekend in terms of making sure I've got a good sense of what the examiners are looking for, but I'm pretty optimistic that this one will go well. And then I'll be done, and I hope will be able to breathe a bit more easily again.
I was much happier with these (which is good, because between them they're worth five times as many marks as the translation). In terms of content my answers were fairly prosaic, but they answered the question, had a coherent thread, and used plenty of specific examples from the text to back up my assertions, which at this level is really all they expect. A significant portion of the marks come from the range of both vocabulary and grammatical strucutres used, at which point my complete inability to construct a thought with fewer than half a dozen subclauses becomes an asset, at least as long as I'm able to turn those complex thoughts into comprehensible French, which I think I managed.
I finished about 40 minutes early, and decided that those minutes would be more useful to me as extra revision time for the afternoon's exam than double checking the translation, so I left and pored over my RS notes over sushi in a nearby restaurant.
The second exam was Ethics and Religion, and definitely my weakest so far. Unlike in Philosophy of Religion, where I felt confident that I was answering all the questions with solid material from the course, there were a couple this time in which I was definitely winging it. Fortunately, those were also the questions with the fewest marks available, so I'm hopeful that I won't have missed out on too much. Also, we were interrupted by a fire alarm (caused by a malfunction rather than an actual fire), which meant having to stand outside for half an hour in the middle of the exam. I suspect that this may turn out to be to my benefit for a few reasons - one is that we essentially got an extra half hour of thinking time, which may well have improved my answers slightly when we got back in, and the other is that the centre have asked that we all get special consideration because of the disruption, which I think basically translates to "if you're right on the grade boundary, you might get bumped up".
One exam left to go, on Monday, which is on Christianity, about which I feel reasonably confident in my knowledge. I still want to do some last minute revision over the weekend in terms of making sure I've got a good sense of what the examiners are looking for, but I'm pretty optimistic that this one will go well. And then I'll be done, and I hope will be able to breathe a bit more easily again.
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