Negative Marking My Arse

I'd just like to open with an appeal to my, what appears to be, lone follower in Russia who has searched the url especially to read this. Care to leave a comment, just out of interest?

Anyway! My fellow university students, I share your pain. To anyone who doesn't know, the majority of universities have, over the last few weeks, inflicted exams upon us and from what I've seen so far, no one is safe. Some of the people I live with or see a lot who have put immense amounts of work into their studies and in all fairness deserve good grade, have found their tests truly grueling. I hope that you have pushed through and remember... there are always re-sits. I myself am well prepared to have a nice barbecue combined with intense cramming over summer when I miss the pass grade for my modules.

In some areas however, it's not so bad. Take today's exam for example: I only knew for definite the answers to three questions out of 35. Three for heavens sake. But in the overall scheme of things, with the help of two of my wonderful course mates, our combined coursework was such a high grade that we each only needed to get four correct answers to pass the module, so I can only pray that one of my 32 guesses was on the money.

Something which in my opinion is ridiculous and counter intuitive to everything we are taught through GCSE and A Level is 'negative marking'. For anyone ignorant as to the principle, as I was until this week, it means that for every wrong answer marks are subsequently deducted. Now, this might be fair enough in something like medicine because none of us wants a doctor who guesses at the right medication to give. But when it is used in a multiple choice grammar exam where the answers are all so similar and so you become confused, you are hesitant to go with your gut and you over think every answer therefore I believe ruling out less confident people from getting the top marks where they might be able to achieve them. Or maybe I'm just bitter because I didn't know the answers and would have liked to be able to guess in peace. We'll never know.

In any case, I shall be free from exams at 10.15 on Friday and it couldn't come any sooner. Chin up everyone. Unless you think you've failed? In which case I'd get your head down.