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CA3 pre-reading material - question

M

mattt78

Member
I was quite suprised by something in my recent CA3 exam, and wondered if other people have encountered the same thing.

On the day of the written exam, we were all allowed to read through the pre-exam reading material Then, during the exam, this pre-exam reading material is not available - this was a suprise to me! I had assumed it would be available in the exam itself too.

So I suppose I have two questions:
(i) did other people also find the pre-reading was not available in the written exam?
(ii) if so, i'm curious as to why this rule is applied - any ideas anyone? (It seems odd to expect you to memorise facts and figures for a communications exam).

Thanks! :cool:
 
My reaction is why would you want it in there? Do you really have time to do the reading and make the best effort at the actual qn in point?

If you had 'model answers' to other qns in there, isn't the exam almost open to 'tweaking' whereas it should be a test of your skill.

Fair enough to have some technical stuff to refer to as its hard to keep everything up top.

But anyway, I guess this is very contraversial.....
 
bystander said:
My reaction is why would you want it in there? Do you really have time to do the reading and make the best effort at the actual qn in point?
Fair enough to have some technical stuff to refer to as its hard to keep everything up top.
But anyway, I guess this is very contraversial.....
Click to expand...

We're not allowed to discuss details of exam questions (as they re-use CA3 exams) but the pre-reading was just a couple of pages of mostly quantitative material which was very specific to the exam question itself. It wasn't just general background reading (like an extract from core reading) - otherwise I would agree with you.

It doesn't particularly bother me, since I doubt it would have affected what I wrote. I just found the arrangement rather odd and unexpected, and wondered if it was a mistake, or if not, what the thinking was behind it. (Its even stranger when you consider that they (I think) allow you to take into the exam the yellow workbook (including notes you've made) from the first day of the CA3 course!)

On the time issue - since the exam is now typed, everyone seemed to finish with about half an hour left, which is nice :cool:
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi, do you mean the written exam component is now submitted as a word document instead of a handwritten one?
 
CA3 exam

calibre2001 said:
Hi, do you mean the written exam component is now submitted as a word document instead of a handwritten one?
Click to expand...

yes, that's right.

As long as you can type at a reasonable speed, its a real help compared to the old written exam. 90 mins to type 400-500 words (after 15 mins reading/planning time) is pretty generous. When I took it most people seemed to finish typing after about an hour, and alot of people left early.
 
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