University Exam Hijinks

Last Friday, I was all prepared and psyched up to head on down to Unitar for my first mid-term examination paper for this semester. It was LAN 0023 Islamic Studies. I double checked the Excel file they’d emailed on the 11th and confirmed that the time and place for the last time.

Left the house at 8.10 am to make the 9.00 am exam. Made it there with 15 minutes to spare because it was Nuzul al-Quran, Selangor had a public holiday and the streets weren’t that filled with Kuala Lumpur’s accursed traffic. Got a great place to park right in front of where the exam is to be held. Then I walked up to the exam timetable Excel printout they posted on the bulletin board.

I discovered to my horror there were no exams scheduled for last Friday. (Though it took about 5 minutes for the horror to set in, for some reason.)

Thanks to some help from the Head of Security, I discovered that there was an e-mail posted several days after they sent the Excel timetable file that rescheduled LAN 0023 to the following Friday.

What a waste of time.

Now, of course I do admit I should have went through each of my emails from the university with a fine tooth comb, but I really wish they would consolidate their information dissemination properly and via a single protocol and single channel in their online network. I look for important announcements in the e-mail (cluttered with everything from death announcements to job openings), in the general announcement, in the course announcements, and sometimes if there are no announcement found (or unable to be found) I rely on the course schedule which is, more often than not, rewritten several times in the span of a semester to account for unforseeable factors.

I mean, they are half way there already. Their online portal, named VOISS is already automatically customized to only display links to your own subjects for the semester, and also to display your previous semester’s results by accessing the database.

Now all they have to do is put exam announcements in its own dynamic webpage, pulled from a database. Any changes, just one designated person does it and the exam schedule page (listing your exam courses, dates, time, and location) change along with it. No fuss no muss.