Exams!

Much of my time here in the last month and a half has been consumed by National Exams in my school. In secondary school (8th-12th grade) students have to do exams twice, once at the end of 10th grade to move onto 11th and again at the end of 12th grade to officially graduate from school. There is a separate exam for each subject. The 10th graders have to do exams in Portuguese, English, Geography, History, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics. 12th graders usually have to do a maximum of five exams and have more lee-way because they can choose to do one exam over the other. During exam weeks, testing is run from 8am until 6pm. Boy, it is exhausting standing and watching kids take exams for 8 hours a day! The students have two opportunities to pass all of their exams. In the first week of exams they could pass 3 exams and then have to come back and pass the others in the second week of exams which happens a month later.
I was placed in a group with several other teachers correcting the exams of the twelfth grade students. The exams are multiple choice and they are done on scantron sheets. These sheets are USUALLY used because they are quickly corrected by a machine, but we end up correcting and grading them by hand and then the tests get sent to Maputo to correct our errors. Why are the exams not sent to the machines in the first place to save us days of work? I'll never know...
Once the exams are corrected we have to enter all of the grades into a chart to print out, post, and show to the students. Since people have little to no computer skills I have been the one to enter in the grades because something that takes me an hour takes everyone else five, and it's pretty painful to watch.
Most volunteers don't have to participate in this process of exams, but I didn't really insist against it and it is interesting to see how the process goes. Luckily, or obviously, my tenth grade English students did very well on their exams which made me very happy! I practiced sample exams with them for weeks so I was so pleased to see that the preparation paid off! Just one more day of exams and then I'm out of Mozambique and on my way home!