Students complain about UNISA Exam

Nom Chompsky

Nom Chompsky

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Wow, the allegations in this article are shocking :eek:. I actually can't believe that academics can be so lazy... surely someone should have looked over it before giving it to students? Hopefully it gets sorted out in the correct way.

News 24

Johannesburg - Several Unisa education students are furious about an exam paper in which the Afrikaans and English questions were radically different.

There were several complaints about the exam paper for the subject EDMHODR (the educator as mediator of learning).

Some of the students realised something was wrong when they checked the questions in English because of the alleged poor language in the Afrikaans exam paper.

A KwaZulu-Natal student who wanted to remain anonymous because he feared he may be penalised, said some of the multiple choice questions had, for instance, been repeated three times. "It doesn't look as if the exam paper was moderated in any way."

He was very worried about getting bad marks because the multiple choice questions, which made up 50% of the paper, were being marked by a computer.

Different questions

"If the Afrikaans and English answers are different, but supposed to be the same, then we will of course be disadvantaged."

He said the problem was not only with the multiple choice questions. The longer questions were also completely different and were even for different marks.

For example, one question in Afrikaans was: What are the classroom factors that cause learning obstacles? In English, the same question relates to which conduct in education encourages good behaviour.

"I complained on the discussion forum but the only reaction that I got from the lecturer was that they were aware of the problem. But I want to know what they will do about it.

"If the university wants to promote education as it claims to, the staff will really have to make more effort to be accurate."

Production error

Another student from Pretoria said she hoped Unisa wouldn't want them to rewrite the exam paper. "It is already a huge struggle to get leave if you are teaching."

According to this student, she was told the mistake had slipped in during the production process and that two different exam papers had been joined, while it was supposed to have been the same paper in Afrikaans and English.

"Unisa has to take responsibility for this mess and let us know what will happen now."

Unisa spokesperson Doreen Gough said an SMS was sent to all Afrikaans-speaking students who wrote the paper to tell them that the university was aware of it.

A moderator and a second examinator would monitor the whole process.
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UnUnOctium said:
UNISA, sounds about right :p
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Yeah I'm glad I'm at UCT. Although I heard today that a Marketing 2 exam was delayed by 1h15min yesterday evening (so instead of starting at 5PM, they started at 6.15PM) because they ran out of exam papers. It doesn't surprise me though... the Marketing department at UCT is - too put it mildly - disorganised :p.
 
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About Right SA

Sounds about right for most "tertiary" institutions in SA.

Terrifying when one starts talking to students about what goes on , and having a look at their papers and marks.

Anyone know of ANY place that has kept their standards up ????
 
MidnightWizard said:
Sounds about right for most "tertiary" institutions in SA.

Terryfing when one starts talking to students about what goes on , and having a look at their papers and marks.

Anyone know of ANY place that has kept their standards up ????
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I think the main problem is the 'inside'.People getting hired just for the sake of BEE or what not.Lecturers that I have at UNISA are excellent but dear lord some of the admin are clueless.
 
Korn1 said:
I think the main problem is the 'inside'.People getting hired just for the sake of BEE or what not.Lecturers that I have at UNISA are excellent but dear lord some of the admin are clueless.
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Right with you on that one. I swear the admin department's job is to piss off students as much as possible with their ineptitude in doing basic tasks. They hardly have to do much during the year and yet they complain at the beginning of the year about how much 'stress' they are under as they have to register new and returning students. They also like to call students 'demanding' which is a polite way of saying students are a menace to them.
 
Chris said:
Yeah I'm glad I'm at UCT. Although I heard today that a Marketing 2 exam was delayed by 1h15min yesterday evening (so instead of starting at 5PM, they started at 6.15PM) because they ran out of exam papers. It doesn't surprise me though... the Marketing department at UCT is - too put it mildly - disorganised :p.
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Ha. Had the same thing happen at Stellenbosch about 2 years ago with a Mercantile Law exam paper. The law department carries the "disorganised" badge here.
 
Well, I'm not exactly surprised to hear that about UNISA.

Although not all universities are bad, you must remember each faculty have their own admin and then each department has a further admin section, so you can't really say a whole university is bad from one department.

For example the department of Accounting at UP is quite good and not once (yet) have I had a bad experience with them.

Something cool I read was the top position after the first saica board exam was jointly held by 3 students from UP
 
I don't blame people for wanting to send their kids overseas to study. FFS, Botswana would probably be a better option than this place in a few years from now.
 
MidnightWizard said:
Sounds about right for most "tertiary" institutions in SA.

Terrifying when one starts talking to students about what goes on , and having a look at their papers and marks.

Anyone know of ANY place that has kept their standards up ????
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Well, I've been at UP for 4 years and going onto 1 year at UCT and have never had issues like this. Though it can be argued that UP's admin is probably one of the best in the country and UCT's, well, ya :p but even then I haven't had probs.
 
MidnightWizard said:
Sounds about right for most "tertiary" institutions in SA.

Terrifying when one starts talking to students about what goes on , and having a look at their papers and marks.

Anyone know of ANY place that has kept their standards up ????
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Tuks.

I'm a 2nd year civil engineering student and I've never come across or heard of anything like this happening.
 
I'm a 2nd year accounting student at NMMU. Generally our tests are fine. Last year we were given a stats exam that had no correlation to our syllabus though, but my mark only dropped by 3%, so pretty sure it counted for nothing.
 
Bryn26 said:
I'm a 2nd year accounting student at NMMU. Generally our tests are fine. Last year we were given a stats exam that had no correlation to our syllabus though, but my mark only dropped by 3%, so pretty sure it counted for nothing.
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E{(X^H)X}, you did well, got the correlelogram? :p
 
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