the second and last day of my exams... phew...

today's exams were really exhausting... simply because i had a three hour paper that started at 9.30am and an hour and a half paper that commenced at 2pm.

the morning paper was my german and french lit paper which didnt go very well... basically the university has a policy against self-plagiarism so you cant do an exam question on a text that you have chosen for your assessed essay. in the exam you have one essay from the french side, one essay from the german side and then have a choice of one out of four extracts from any of the 10 texts we have done to write a critical commentry on. so when i went into the exam the first thing i did was look at the extracts and eliminate which were the ones i couldnt (by default) do. to my horror, out of the 4, i had could not do the extracts from Camus and Brecht and was left with Gide and Fontane. i hadnt even looked through Gide before the exam but had prepared Effi Briest (Fontane) as a back-up essay question. so i quickly looked to the german essay questions for Marat/Sade to make sure that i could do the question. AND I DIDNT UNDERSTAND IT AT ALL. so i panicked. but THANK GOD that this year there was a general german question! i tried to think how i could write an essay on Marat/Sade to answer that question and it seemed plausible so i started my french essay and had a frantic race against time (i had wasted about 10 mins already).

i didnt get to write a conclusion for ANY of my 3 essays because i took too long to write my french one so stopped it when i had said most of what i wanted to, realised that if i kept writing and trying to crack my brains on how to write a conclusion for my Effi Briest one i'd kill myself for my last question by not giving myself enough time, and basically ran out of time on my german question.

and i hate doing my exam in Butterworth Hall in the Arts Centre. know why? because they put so many different groups of people there and there were papers that were 1 1/2hrs long, 2 hrs long and 3 hrs long. the invigilators at the beginning were shouting out some errors in 2 of the question papers (no mistakes in mine) and the echoing plus the sheer volume of it was such a disturbance that i could not even hear myself think (at this point i was already panicking because i didnt understand the Marat/Sade question) and i literally had to use my fingers to block my ears to hear myself think. and at the last 15mins of each paper they called out the time and all the blah blah about not being able to leave the hall. in essence i kept getting distracted - know when you ahev so many thoughts in your head and the slightest disturbance makes you lose your trend of thought? yup that was me.

the afternoon paper was quite ok. it was a film paper and on the film we had been shown 3 weeks ago (the mystery film that no one knew till the first screening). i really didnt know what to expect because i had no idea what kind of questions there were so i kept re-reading all the notes i had taken during the film and some of the critical reading. apparently we had been told what kind of questions they would ask but i think during the lecture i assumed richard dyer was talking abt the 8 1/2 question in yesterday's paper. anyway it was a straightforward question and with plenty of time i tried not to stress and managed to come up with a satisactory answer that was long enough for personal liking. it felt so weird having 5 mins left and looking around (just in case no one else had stopped so that i might decide to write more) and a lot of people actually finished early too.

anxious about my results... can you believe it? i just finished my exams today and what i am thinking about are my results! well i'll just have to wait patiently for them (in 4 weeks). but in the meantime, i shall start my cooking spree! wheee...