I'm in the last stages of midterm limbo, the period between finishing writing the exam and beginning to grade it. (The exams are currently sitting in an ominously large box just down the hall, so I really should be exiting midterm limbo and entering grading purgatory.) Exam contents may not vary much by continent, but the exam administration here has a distinctly different flavor (or as I should write, "flavour") than what I'm used to.
In the U.S., final exams are generally run by the university rather than the instructor, but at ANU, this holds for mid-semester exams as well. I was allowed to specify what week I wanted for my midterm, but the exams office chooses the day, schedules the room, and hires the invigilators. I suppose there could be some advantages to this system, especially with respect to exam conflicts and make-ups, but I was unimpressed by the three (four?) weeks we waited to find out when our exam would be held; it makes a big difference to the lecture schedule to have a Thursday exam instead of a Monday one.
The exam itself is quite formal: students are told what time the room opens, down to the minute, and they have to present their ID's to the invigilators. I've heard of this sort of identity check at big state schools in the U.S., but ANU is smaller than Stanford. After the time starts, the students have an additional fifteen minutes to look at the test before beginning to write. During this time, they're allowed to write notes on the official "Scribble Paper" (labeled thus!), but they can't start writing anything that they'll ultimately turn in. I think this is a great idea, and I wonder how easy it would be to import to an American college without this tradition.
The cheeping of the exams, "Grade us! Grade us!" is getting louder, so it's time to get to work...
