Exam time

Every student at Saint Loius sits an end of year exam. This includes all the kindergarten students right through to secondary six. As I have taken on the role of teaching Primary 4, 5 and 6. I was required to write three exams, one for each year level. Each exams had to be 40 questions which was broken into 30 multiple choice questions and ten true and false questions. The exam had to be difficult to challenge the students but not too difficult so the students would fail.


I found it easy enough to write the exam for the Primary 5's and 6's as I had been teaching them all semester. The Primary 4 exam was hard to put together though as the exam was due the same week I started teaching the year level and was left little help from the teacher who left the school.

The English exam was the students final exam on Friday afternoon and I am sure they were all tired by then and could not be bothered with the exams.

It really doesn't make a big difference though. No student at Saint Louis can fail English.I am not sure if that's just the school policy or if it is a private school policy. It's a little disheartening when at the end of the semester those students who have tried hard get almost the same mark as those who have shown no progress at all. Many students at the school know they can pass English without trying and therefore do not try. Only one student in the 800 plus exams I corrected ticked true for every answer in the True/False. It was smart thinking as he got 5/10.

Some students at the school can leave without even being able to speak a single sentence in English. But it is not completly there fault, with 50 students in a class it is easy to get lost in the system and get left behind.

While the students sat their exams I along with all the other foreign teachers had nothing to do. Luckily the Facebook ban had been lifted and gave us something to do for at least a couple of hours a day. When all my students had finished there exams I had to correct the true/false questions for all 800 plus exams. Luckily I was helped by some of the other teachers who offered to help to ease the boredam. Then when all exams where marked I put all the results into the computer and my work at Saint Louis was done. In the final week we spent the week trying to sneak out of school for as long as possible as we had to be at school from 7.30am until 4.00pm to get paid a full salary.