Word: exam
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...Harvard has made distinguishing among good students nearly impossible, especially in the humanities. Papers and tests get letters grades, from which a standard deviation cannot easily be computed. Even if one were to use Harvard’s 15-point grading scale to calculate the standard deviation for an exam in an English class, the value would likely hover around one—far too small to make meaningful comparisons. It has become all too common for the goof-off and the hard-working genius to be separated by a single plus or minus on their transcript. When almost half...
...Time is up! Stop writing immediately!” admonishes a serious, bespectacled old lady at 5:15 p.m. from the front of Lowell Lecture Hall. To the exam-weary student, she’s just another onerous part of an altogether unhappy experience—an enemy who clearly does not understand the importance of those extra five seconds...
Wrong. She’s probably been calling time professionally for about 40 years. Exam proctors are hired by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of the Registrar—and while many of them are Harvard graduate students, a huge number are retired schoolteachers...
Often, they hear about the opportunity to proctor exams through retiree groups or by word of mouth and are anxious to relive the “experience of going into a classroom,” says Field Manager of Exams and Registrar Services Mike Fournier. In many cases, Fournier explains, they just enjoy being around students. He recalls a proctor who was overjoyed to see a student she one of her former high school students, who had been in her sophomore history class. But sometimes the age of the retirees-turned-proctors can make for a precarious situation, he says...
Many students say they think proctors waste time with their lengthy exam introductions, but Fournier (who does acknowledge that some of the proctors are oddballs) insists that it’s their job: “The proctors are required to read a statement out of the handbook and it’s quite lengthy. They’re required to read it verbatim,” he says. Although some experienced proctors have developed abbreviated introductions, many new proctors follow the rules to the letter...