THE CANCELLATION of our monthly exams became a temporary relief after classes became irregular for two weeks due to the flood and national and faculty activities.
However, the complacent mood set by our professors’ announcement of a reversion to the prelims-finals grading period was not for long.
Long quizzes, which the professors were told to give, were scheduled one after the other to compensate for the cancelled exam although they would just form part of the prelims grade, the reversion still favorable on our part.
And if the cancellation came as a surprise, the “detraction process” was rather a “safe play”. The detraction is said to be a consideration of the complaint made by the student council, which argued that the 50-50 percentage of a two-period grading system does not favor the students.
Meanwhile, the detraction became very easy because the memorandum that supposedly announced the cancellation is vague. It stated the cancellation of the scheduled monthly exam and scheduled the exams for the two remaining grading periods.
In all this, it’s a matter of interpretation.
And now, the students are being accused of misinterpreting the memorandum issued last July 10, when in fact, the professors were the ones who made the announcement.
The students and even the professors certainly understand the memo as reversion to the old grading system, that is, given the benefit of the doubt that students have read the memo. Because if not, and that’s most probably the case, the students did not misinterpret the memo. What they know is what their professors told them.
The supposed “consideration” became an agony for some because even before the clarification was made, some already had their quizzes turned into a monthly exam. The memo that clarified the issue and set the new schedule for the exams for the preliminary and final grading periods was issued only last July 24 when most quizzes turned to monthly exams had already taken place. And besides, because of the cancellation of the schedule, teachers must arrange a special schedule for the monthly exams of the students without sacrificing regular classes—a burden that the students are made to carry.
