Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Exam Proctoring

You know it is a very different world being the one giving an exam instead of being the one taking the exam. All semester I have been proctoring exams for the class that I am a TA for. Every time I do it I have to make myself look at other people and look at their exams and what they are doing. This goes totally counter to my built in test reflexes. As a test taker during a test you are not supposed to look at anybody else and you are definitely not supposed to look at their notes or their exams.

After having been on the side of the test takers for all these years the furtive test taking behavior has become automatic. So that now that I am actually a TA and I am actually supposed to be watching people I have to fight it. It is actually pretty interesting to see what happens during a test. Since now you get to sit and watch people you get to see that this person is having a hard time with problem 3 or that person did problem 4a right but is doing 4b wrong etc. It isn't 2 hours worth of interesting though but then again you wouldn't expect it to be, I'm getting paid to do this.

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