We had "Mini" system at ROSS. As much as I hated it,still, it kept me humble, and on my toes all the time. The problem is when they started using it not to help but to hurt students by asking irrelavant, in depth info, which was never even covered. Or when they tried to outsmart everybody else so much that they had to accept more than one "right" answer in the multiple choice questions .I hope it won't be used agaist the students at SMU

Prior to the new exam format we had exams when ever the professor wanted to have them. As a result we had exams every week. No one was ever coming to class because they would skip and cram for the next exam. A friend would try and sign them in so they would maintain the 80% attendence.
In the end no-one was learning anything because of all the craming, and the sign in sheet became a real point of contention for both faculty and students. The new system was put inplace to try and cut down on those problems.

BAD IDEA!!!! The Mini system at Ross (Black Monday) was a horrible experience. Your grade was based on 30 questions for some classes...Keep things the way they are. If you want to train people for an 8 hour exam keep giving the comp every semester, and have the Kaplan mock exam (which is 8 hours also) for 4th & 5th semesters.

__________________
Juni

I believe that the semester's exam schedule should be made and distributed the first week of classes, quizes can be at the teacher's discresion. Even if we have 1 day between exams to review, that would be better than 2 exams a day. The other school tried to do 2 exams a day and gave us a 4 hour buffer between each exam but it wasn't effective.

If people sign the attendence for other people that should be grounds for expulsion. I believe AUC expelled a student last semster for that reason. We have a predetermined number of days we can be absent, it is up to the student to use them wisely.

[quote=billydoc] As much as I hated it,still, it kept me humble, and on my toes all the time.

I can be humble without block exams

As lazy as I am, if I can get up and go to class anybody can. Damn, those 11:00 classes are killing me this semester ...

When I had to leave AUC, guess what the final nail in my coffin was? That's right block exams! I was so destroyed by the end of that semester that I needed a semester off just to recover. Luckily, while I switched schools, I had to take one off anyway for financial aid reasons.

Ultimately, I have a distaste for block exams and hope that SMU won't be dumb enough to implement them. As Laurie pointed out, AUC found out the hard way how terrible an idea they were, meanwhile the school's owner laughed all the way to the bank with the extra cash he made from students who would be on the island an extra semester. Some professors who had petitioned for the block exams, later disavowed all allegiance to them and one even pretended to have been against them from the beginning. What was the biggest foul-up that AUC failed to realize early on? At Ross, they have block exams, but do so with the knowledge that there will have to be a huge curve to ensure that at least some of their students pass. Students aim for a 55 in hopes that the MPS will be set around there. Well at AUC there were NO curves implemented and that is why so many failed. Truly sad, how in those days AUC wanted so badly to imitate Ross and instead ended up imitating Ross badly.

Should we take a vote on how many people liked block exams?

I think counting on my fingers and toes will be enough.

My vote would be with the finger in the middle.

After reading these posts it looks like alot of off-shore schools tried block exams and decided they weren't beneficial so changed to another system.

Are there any off-shore schools that tried block exam and are still using them?

If we take 3 exams per session, could we have 1 exam per day, Monday, Wednesday & Friday.