Odd Exam Hall Related Things in NUS

These are some annoyances during the midterm or final term exams.

A random exam paper heading that we are all used to

a) Unstable Rocky Tables and Chairs

Depending on your luck, you may get a table and chair that both tilt to one side depending on which side the force is on. This force starts becoming very noisy when you attempt to correct a mistake in the OCR form with a rubber.

Some of you may say, just put some tissue at the unstable stand. But, during the exam, every second counts and you don't want to waste time maintaining the stability of the table.

Especially if the bloke in front/behind of you has the same predicament, everytime he erases something or adjusts his position, either things start falling down or his table makes a banging noise.

b) Temperature

Sometimes the hall is very cold as if they want us to buy the promotional NUS jackets.

Freezing sometimes! But fortunately, we can voice out and they will re-adjust the temperatures

It is such a common warning that lecturers give before the exam that I wonder why the maintainers don't bother to increase the temperature.

Then again, in the lectures I attend nowadays, the temperature is only slightly lower than outside. Gone are the days where entering a lecture room / tutorial room would mean getting some cold air from the warmth outside. It is still air conditioned, but only slightly. It is probably due to the environmental initiatives but what use is it of the air conditioner if it is only a few degrees lower than the outside?

c) Counting Exam Papers

During the end of every exam, all exam papers must be accounted for before any student can leave. 99% of the time, this causes a 15 minute delay. Those leaving early get to escape this lateness event.

In 99% of the cases, I believe, is human error. So why doesn't NUS invest in an exam paper machine counter or a procedure to collect/count exam papers efficiently and save the whole lot of students some time?

We're talking students filled in a whole Multi-Purpose Hall being held back just because someone made an error counting the papers.

d) Scanned Exam Papers

Some of the scanned archived exam papers are very crooked. For some reason, the person-in-charge is not able to obtain the digital PDF copy of the exam papers to host them online.

Why doesn't that person chase after the module's course coordinators for the digital PDF rather than scanning each paper one by one?

Some of us like to print two pages in one, and by having a digital version (rather than the scanned PDF version), the print quality of the text is also much better.

Maybe they just want to save time from chasing the lecturers.