My MBA second semester results was out last weekend, and I waited until it’s Wednesday to post it. I know I am lazy, but a lot have been going on these days, so bear with me ok.

Well, I got a B in International Business and a B+ in Economics. Not bad I must say, given the fact that I finished my International Business assignment in less than 2 days and both my Economics assignment in slightly less than 4 days.
I was expecting my grades for International Business to be better than my Economics’ grades beause until now, I don’t really understand what is the whole subject talking about. I understood enough to be able to complete my assignments and handed up on time and that’s it!

I heard a lot of people were having the same expectations like mine, but it turned out to be the opposite. Maybe because the Economics lecturer was a new lecturer and she was a bit lenient. Or maybe it was the change of format for the International Business Examination.

You see, all our exams have 6 questions and 4 have to be answered within 3 hours. Naturally we assumed that that’s the case with the International Business exam. About 2 weeks before the exam, we were informed (by our classmates) that the format was changed to:

• 7 questions, answer 5 (80%)
• 20 multiple choice questions (20%)
• Duration – 3 hours

Since our classmates broke the news to us, we didn’t take it seriously because it was not official.

The next week, i.e. 1 week before the exam, the college announced the new format. Everyone was furious because we were not told earlier. All past year questions were in the old format. We were all trained to answer the questions in 45 minutes per question. There were no sample on the multiple choice questions and the topics we predicted will come out for the exam is only for the 7 questions (more or less you’ll know what is going to come out based on past year questions), but not for the multiple choice questions.

And to make matters worse, exam is only 1 week away.

I didn’t care about the multiple choice questions because i figured if I could do well in the 7 questions, I could still pass. So I concentrated on the “predicted” questions.

During exam, I did all 5 questions as fast as I could. There wasn’t time for me to pick my nose, go to the toilet or do any of those nonsense.

By the time I finished my 5 questions, there was only 10 minutes left. Meaning 30 seconds for each multiple choice question.
I read the questions once, answered and that’s it. I didn’t bother to read the question again to understand what it wants or check the answers again to se if it’s right or wrong.
I looked at my answer script at the end of the exam and to my horror, I could barely read my writing because I was writing so fast that I just scribbled on the answer booklet. There wasn’t much I could do. I handed it up and let the lecturer decide my grades.

Well, everything turned out alright after all. I heard there were a few people that failed the paper. I am sure they will complain about the change of format. As long as the complains don’t affect my grades, by all means, do it. It’s not profesional for a college to misinform their students like this.