Yet another confusing thing about the educational institution I'm attending. I have three final exams, two multiple choice, one essay. All of the exams have a 10 minute "reading time", two hour duration (plus that 10 minutes), and you're not allowed to leave your seat for the first 90 minutes. I guess the "no leaving" policy is to prevent people from somehow copying the test and transmitting answers to someone else. I get that. I have a policy - once I've concentrated on and answered questions, I don't go back and second-guess. Technically, I could have gone through every question again and made sure I marked the answer I wanted to mark, but that to me only seems like prolonging the pain. I'm not one to quibble over every single grade point.
The part I really don't get is the "reading time". You're supposed to read the exam; you're not allowed to use your pencil or mark anything. I can see how this could be helpful on the essay exam - you need to think through how you're going to compose your answers to an allotted word count, and you can start that in your head during the "reading time". But for a multiple-choice exam of 100 questions, it seems a bit silly to read through the exam and not be able to make any marks. Sure, maybe your brain can start ruminating over the questions you read and don't immediately know the answer? But if you're ruminating, you may be concentrating less on each of the other questions as you get to them. I suppose there's some scientifically derived strategy for using this reading time for a multiple choice exam of 100 questions? Personally, I'd just as soon get on with marking the answers.
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