Q's Place

Recently I had an exam at university for "Human Computer Interaction", the exam was 3 hours long.

Now in this exam your allowed to bring a postcard sized piece of paper with one sides worth of notes, this is fine if you have very good eye sight as you could just write [size=7]really small[/size] and fit pages worth of information on the postcard.
Now for myself I have [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_Sensitivity_Syndrome]Irlen Syndrome[/link] which means I have trouble reading under certain light conditions, when the text is the wrong contrast to the paper, if the text is too small, amongst other problems (I will explain more in another post). Now I can only fit 6 or so legible lines of text on the same size postcard, fair eh? So at short notice I was allowed to use an A4 piece of paper, which just means I get 20 legible lines, still not quite the same as I've seem other students write on there postcards but at least it was a very appreciated concession from the university (Personally I feel two A4 sheets would have been a fair amount.)

Now I do get support with my exams, however there is normally a slight communication problem when exam time comes. In exams I'm allowed the use of a computer in a private room, this allows me to manipulate the text to a more suitable colour, size and font as well as allowing me to input text at a rate more on par with someone who writes by hand; but alias unless I make sure that everything is prepared in advanced this doesn't normally happen. However this time around I made sure that everything was in place, I contacted the relevant office early to make the necessary arrangements and apart from the minor hiccup of being assigned a room which is on the general network (which doesn't allow for me to change desktop size, screen colour, text size, etc.) and not the specialist computing network I was able to completed my exam on a computer even if it was 3 hours in front of a computer with only a 10 minute break.

Now during the exam I was asked to save my work to floppy disk, yes you did read the last sentence correctly it does say "[b]floppy disk[/b]" as in one of those thin magnetic prone disks invented in 1982 (that's 3 years before I was born). Although if I was to be fair the type of disk I had to use was invented in 1987 (2 years after I was born). Still I was asked to save my work to a piece of technology that's at least 21 years old and has been proven to be an unreliable and non durable method of backup. However it was request by the invigilator so who am I to argue with university policy even if there are more stable and suitable media  such as a [link=http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148508]9p cdr[/link] or  a [link=http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/1GB+Arianet+Silver+Shadow+Pen+Drive+?productId=30817]53p re-usable pen drive[/link].

Now my exam was at least 3 weeks ago, and yesterday when I went into university to sort some course change forms, enrolment details and to talk to the module leader in charge of the exam I was told that my exam was bad. I initially took this to mean I'd failed, however it emerged that he meant the document submitted had been corrupted and as such un-markable.
My first point on this is, I found out 3 weeks after the event; although I suppose it's not that much of a problem compared to the second point which is it was suggested that I might have to resit the exam.

Outraged isn't the a suitable enough word to describe how I felt when I was told, although I kept my cool and acknowledged that this might be the case. However I made it clear to both my module leader and course leader that this would only happen as the absolute last resort and that I felt a more fair way to solve the problem would be to mark it as an average grade according to my past work within the module, after all my lecturer has been teaching me for 12 weeks this year (as well as teaching me in previous years) so should have a rough idea of what I'm capable to producing in an exam.

Well that was the first of many almighty "rattyposts" or as I'm going to term them "qrants".

I will attempt to keep this site updated with how things go on in relation to the exam results.