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.

Advertising and Useless Announcements in NUS E-Mail

NUS E-mail is being used to communicate all sorts of things that should be posted in a bulletin board / mailing list.

Recently I received the following mails:

Racing Cars anyone? And from a source I would trust

IMPORTANT news to all SoC students!! New music library operating times! Huh?


Free advertising privilege for a NOC student?


Some 'thoughtfully' come with the <ADV> prefix and even require read receipts

Seriously! How does the hours of music library changing operating times warrant an e-mail to be sent to all SoC e-mail accounts?

An option is to block the senders. However, the senders also sometimes (About 30% of the time) send important information. Not much choice there eh, mate?

Why can't NUS have a page of mailing lists that we can select to opt in? E.g. Music Library Announcements, Engineering Faculty Activities, SoC Events, etc. There are NUS groups that you can opt out of, which only like 5% of the senders utilise.

Maybe NUS should consider linking up with GMail Custom Domains to fight email spam. Or allow us to forward all mails from our NUS account to another account, just like SoC E-mail allows.

The NEW! CORS Gripes

New CORS design. With a pretty ang mo and laptop that looks as if they were digitally combined (photoshopped)

In a list of CORS gripes that keep growing, here are three new ones:

a) Open Bidding Statistics

Why, oh why, doesn't CORS display results of the open bidding statistics right at the Bidding Management page?

Why do I have to go through one long long document for the statistics? See my rant here.

Probable Reason: Requires additional tables and SQL queries that can slow down the system. Right.

OK, I am playing cheat here as I have already mentioned this in another blog post. But this issue deserves another mention as I was getting really frustrated from scrolling up and down when looking for open bidding statistics.

b) Not checking for whether I can take a module BEFORE I add a module

Minor gripe, why doesn't CORS check the eligibility BEFORE I add a module?

Right, tell me this only after I spend time adding, choosing a module and not before it

A minor usability issue. But it could have saved me 5 minutes of my NUS life!

c) Current system time in the bidding page?

Why isn't the current system time shown at the bidding page? Every minute/second makes a difference so the time in the system could be different from the time in my watch during the last few minutes.

Especially for snipers like me <grin>.

Oh well, perhaps this is one of the ways to prevent last minute bidding and err.. 'save resources'.

d) Round 3A starts during term time? Long Round 2A?

Why does CORS Round 3A starting during term time?

Why does Round 2A require 3 (that's THREE) days?? Two days is reasonable, but three days just to watch the bid points go higher and higher and higher and .. you get the idea.

Round 3A starts on the Monday, the first day of lessons

And why does a module allocate slots to each faculty rather that letting the faculties compete with each other? Open field, direct competition with all NUS students. "Save resources"?

Nonetheless, the new CORS design does improve things alot (the navigation is finally non-javascript based). That's only in the front unfortunately. Once you login, it is still the same old thing.