Friday 28 October 2005

Italian Exams


I just finished my mid term exam (had only 1 for Innovation and Technology Management) and am now blessedly free and will soon be heading to Prague, Vienna and Bratislava for the rest of the break. I've come to understand why Italian students can still afford to party hard when exams are just around the corner...they cheat. I don't mean sneaky cheat, but rather openly cheat...like take their friend's paper and copy it or discuss the answers or copy from a cheat sheet. They do it right in front of the examiners too! The examiners know that they cheat but they don't do anything about it. In one exam (unfortunately not the one I took), the professor told the class “Just don't cheat too much”!! Or if the professors do anything it would just be to shush the class from time to time. For the “stricter” ones, they'd give students who were cheating too obviously a verbal warning once and if they caught them again, they merely take 1 or 2 points off their grade. Like Hello? This is a university exam counting towards your final grade right? What's 1 or 2 points out of 30 if you can get 30 by cheating?!! Us exchange students are completely astounded by this Italian way of doing things. I mean all of us have discussed the issue several times and the consensus is that never would you find a university where cheating in exams is so widely accepted except in Italy!! It's insane!! Anyhow, people didn’t cheat too much in my exam...coz my professor is Swiss, rather than Italian, so it'll probably be more fair considering that they moderate results according to a Normal curve.

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