I just spent a frustrating time invigilating the most badly designed examination I have ever had the misfortune to participate in. The main problem was the food, but even the way the thing started and finished was badly handled. We had to march the students down hallways in an unfamiliar part of campus to the examination rooms, a process during which I got lost and had to ask for directions from an uncooperative Sikh who was engaged in an animated conversation with a friend. Once I found the room where my French class was to be examined, we all had to wait around for some of the more unreliable colleagues to arrive. The time allowed for the exam had been extended to take account of this problem, but some of the students were understandably annoyed about sitting there anxiously for over an hour while their invigilators trickled in.
To make things worse, some of my colleagues, teaching other sections of the same course, distributed the papers to their students without waiting for everyone to arrive, and although in theory students were not supposed to start until everyone had a paper, this was not announced, in fact nothing seemed to be announced, and so some students had more time than others to complete the work, and there was a lot of noise from the mutterings of the others. You could hardly hear yourself think. Things were not helped by the fact that the sections were all mixed up, so you had to know your students pretty well to be sure you were handing the exams out to the right ones.
Once the papers were distributed, we had to pick up a sort of attendance sheet for each of our sections and go around distributing the food, which the students had chosen previously and written down on the sheets under their name. So for example I would have to stock up my bag and be sure to give Alex a can of tomato paste, Donna a straw, James a kilo and a half of mandarins and Jihad a case of beer. As I passed, and students saw what the others had ordered, some of them wanted to change their minds - there was a lot of demand for mandarins - and in other cases I had a hard time remembering who was who, so Poppy might miss out on her artichokes, or Winston on his steak. In addition, as I went around, I realized I had not really properly prepared everything: there were whole Cosco-sized packets of pork chops for example clearly marked with instructions to cook before giving out to the students, and here they were slopping around in blood, looking unpleasantly raw.
As I was going through the produce and other foodstuffs, which we had to pick up from bins which were not at all well lit, I became angrier and angrier at the fools in the examination committee who had agreed to this. Why on earth had they not insisted on cooked foods, for example? Why were the students in each section not all together, so we could find them more easily? How had so many students managed to order beer, which was prohibited now even from faculty gatherings and celebrations? Fortunately, Ahmed had a coffee stand. He accepted the package of ground Arabica from me with a grateful grin which made all the mess somehow worthwhile, and then served me a cup of steaming coffee on top of which he added a thick treacle-like substance which for some reason I had to eat all in one go. It was disgusting, and I spat it out, only to realize that some of my students were watching disapprovingly.
