I just took my last final this afternoon. While I’m very glad to be done with finals after weeks of stressing over them, I’m starting to feel that the tether tying me to Hong Kong is unravelling as my time here dwindles. My roommate also returned home yesterday. I have five more days here, including today. I’m caught between missing my family and being unready to leave behind Hong Kong, the friends I’ve made here, and all the experiences and things I have known here. I’m not ready to recollect Hong Kong from the United States, to consider it as an experience gone by, knowing that I most likely will never experience anything like this study abroad again.
It’s starting to really feel like winter, as a couple weeks ago the temperature dropped from the upper/mid 70s to the 50s and 60s. With only air-conditioning in my room, I feel like the humid cold has settled into my bones… I’m always bundled in my three to four layers when I leave the dorm halls.
But before I talk too much about that, I’m going to talk about my exams. For one of my classes, I just had a couple projects to finish. For my other classes, I had more or less traditional final exams, although they differed a bit from the type of exams that I’m used to taking back at Linfield.
The Cantonese-speaking final was like the midterm: we met with the professor and demonstrated our pronunciation ability and that we could respond to simple questions. However, for the written final, it was much more formal than exams I’m used to taking in college. We had a one-hour time slot outside of class time, in a different building than our normal class took place. Additionally, we were assigned a seat number; both classroom and seat number were posted on our school accounts. The environment reminded me of an AP exam, as we had to wait until it was exactly 1 pm to start the exam, and the exam paper had a front cover to fill out with your information.
The final for one of my literature classes was perhaps the most differently-structured exam I took. We had 24 hours outside of class to write our responses to two essay questions. We received the prompts at 6 pm on the first day of the exam, and we had until 6 pm on the next day to submit our responses.
For the next exam, we received four essay questions that we had to respond to in approximately five hundred words. We had five days to write our responses to that exam. I submitted it last night.
Today’s exam really reminded me of an AP exam. It, again, was in person, in a different classroom than the one where we had normal classes, and we were assigned seat numbers. I believe they combined our class (perhaps two different sections of the same class) with another one, as there were two professors proctoring the exam – my professor and one other. When I arrived at the exam room and saw so many people outside that I didn’t recognize, I was originally worried I had gone to the wrong building. Fortunately, that was not the case. I would estimate our class had around 25-ish students, and there were nearly sixty exam booklets set out. We had two hours to write responses to two essay questions. I haven’t had to write an essay in a timed limit since high school, so it was a little bit stressful having to do that again, but it ended up being alright. And now all my exams are over.
Then, my friends and I went out for dinner. 🙂
Until next time,
Kelsi Otto