Exams at HCT:
As most academics worldwide understand and accept, exams are not the best way to either engage, interest or (Heaven Forbid) even assess a student. But HCT makes a fetish of exams, ranging from a 'Quiz' to a 'Mid-term' and, in their parlance, a "FWA" - a "Faculty Wide Assessment". What all this nonsense actually means is: everything in triplicate please, to a strict deadline, subject to scrutiny from an 'Assessment Specialist' - a.k.a. someone who has no idea about your subject specialism, yet can enforce Bloom’s Hierarchy of Knowledge to almost anal precision (with the aid of a textbook).
Erm, excuse me, but most academic institutions have dispatched
Bloom to the intellectual dustbin - or hadn't you noticed? But it’s hopeless.
The key here is to understand that if you are a "Senior Course
Leader" (with no enhancement to pay or time) you must take charge of writing
exams in triplicate for every subject you teach. Each exam must be at least 80%
different from the others. So go figure. … that's 27 different written tests
per subject per term. Folks, it breaks people, especially when each exam comes
back as some obsessive has spotted a comma out of place or a margin that is one
whole millimetre out of alignment. This nonsense all begins in week 1-3, so it
can last a whole semester!
And almost incredibly, it even gets worse. If you manage to get your exams past
the 'Assessment Specialist' (subject to Peer and Academic Program Lead scrutiny
too), then congratulations! You are now obliged to be on campus during the said
exams and to mark them all. Please do not get me started on moderation either! That's
a whole confusing rule-bound and process specific laden process. But I digress.
So through the hurdles, deadlines, returns of work, after the endless weekends
and evenings we finally get to...
Week 12: Deans of 'Academic Operations' insist on mandatory attendance at
"FWA training". This is an opportunity to gather the slaves together,
feed them the regulations and the updates and warn them that any transgression
is a "violation" that has implications for their careers. So just
watch it! These Deans of 'Academic Operations' are merely justifying their salaries
to their masters. Servile and cowing they are whilst looking fearfully upwards,
they now have the chance to flex their addled muscles and brains downwards. Oh
joy!
The bottom line here is that over 200 rules, regulations and their many
variations have to be meticulously obeyed and followed - and then justified if
they are breached. Worse still, they 'update' them every Semester! What this
means, I am afraid to say, is that most Faculty members will find themselves
walking up and down a Hall "actively invigilating" (there are severe
penalties for not being "active") for 2-6 hours a day during the
"exam season" inclusive of Saturdays (without overtime) and marking
all papers, moderating and submitting grade books within 72 hours. Faculty are
also banned from bringing mobiles into the "FWA Zone" and subject to
flogging if they breach that rule. Sorry. I told a lie. It's not the Navy in
the 18th century, it's HCT. But simply put, you'll be punished by
being 're-trained', sent to more invigilation duties, or even sacked. The
'jolliness' that HCT tries to spoon over all this is laughable. One might sick
up "Lashings of Ginger Beer" as it is no picnic. Some people quite
literally break.
Curiously, the HCT ‘management’ has devised a system of self-audit. They
recruit those sad folk who love the retarded system to be 'auditors'... just to
make sure their ‘process’ is running fine. As a result, cue exam season and a
flurry of stern faculty-wide emails emerge from the Dean of 'Academic
Operations' every day: (pull your socks up, Faculty!) about rule breaches
(Saif in Engineering, we saw you sitting down for more than FIVE minutes AND
taking a cheeky pull at the free water bottle, YOU ARE WARNED!"). And of
course, inevitably, there’s a “Look out! The Auditors are on campus today"
(erm, is that the point of random audit?). I give up. And once again inevitably,
there’s a lot of huffing and puffing and tired back slapping when we all get to
the end of the ridiculous process. It's a cruelly bizarre make-believe world,
and it could only exist – nay, flourish! – at HCT.
Just to underline again, forcing students to sit examinations written strictly to Blooms is no way to develop critically thinking minds. But of course, The UAE does not want critical thinkers. Let’s face it, the government here locks up hundreds of its ‘free-thinking’ citizens every year.
It just wants
