I am writing this email to express my frustration with the Spanish 111 final exam. I just returned home from taking this final and to be quite honest, I am seething. The fact that this final was a block final for all the Spanish 111 students was a very poor idea. This idea of the block final was not even remotely helpful, in fact it was horribly the opposite. I went over my previous tests, looking and correcting the little mistakes I made but after my first initial look at the final, I realized much to my horror that i was very ill prepared. Some of the wording in the paragraphs that we were to decipher, seemed as if it was a different dialect of spanish. There was a phrase of "senter...." that was equivelent to "tengo hambre." We did not learn the senter version, we learned that one has hunger.
To cram three different classes, TAUGHT by three different instructors, into a room and force them to take a generalized course final, in terms of the idea, probably ranks right up there with the Titanic setting sail, or even JFK going through Dallas in November of 1963. Do not get me wrong, as I did enjoy my instructor, Jimmy Thornburg. But to put Thornburg's students in the same room taking a test that was not specifically tailored to what Thornburg's students had covered, was in my belief, an incredible lapse in judgement on behalf of the department. I wouldn't have been as frustrated if Spanish 111 was team taught so the students received instruction from all of the different instructors. I highly doubt this is a feasible option for the university however.
Up to the point of actually having the exam in my hands, I felt confident that I could do reasonably well on the final. However, I'm afraid that is not the case. To me, along with my classmates that I talked with after the final exam, we felt that we were in serious trouble in regards to our grades. My frustration also includes having to commute to campus on a Saturday morning to get reamed by an exam. If the class had taken place on a Saturday, I would have no problems at all with a Saturday morning final, but for myself and my classmates, it was a daily class and I think should have been a final sometime during the normal class hours, or even a final during a reasonable block of time.
Until the final exam, I had actually enjoyed taking Spanish. Now I'm afraid that I will dread Spanish as I still have 10 more hours to complete before I can receive a degree. This disaster will also force me to recommend to people looking at starting/continuing their education at Wichita State to look elsewhere to complete their undergraduate degrees.
Thank you,
Rusty
posted by Rusty @ 10:02 PM
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