MAIN DIFFERENCES
If you come from Belgium, France or another country with a similar education system you will be a bit surprised when entering Danish education – no matter the level of education.
From my experience, exams are not something nice to go through; it is more than stressful and they often leave you with a negative image of yourself when you get bad grades.
Even from the beginning of the academic year things have been “chocking” but in a positive way.
First of all, where I study (I talk about that in the next article), students get tests or quizzes that they should do before a certain deadline. However, those tests are not graded and they do not count for your final grade at all, it is just for you. Maybe this is normal for many people but in Belgium, I never saw that.
Also, homework is not graded; it is corrected and comments are often on it but no grade. Homework is just for students to have an idea of what they can expect in an exam or what teachers want them to know or focus on in a chapter.
The third point concerns exams. In fact, I have prepared myself for exams as the teacher said and I feel confident! That is for me a new feeling. I don’t know if it is due to my school experience but I think I have never met a student in my country feeling confident about an exam and when I opened the questionary I understood every question and could answer it.
PREPARATION ADVICE
Of course, as I said I based my preparation on the advice of the teachers (note that I am studying for a bachelor in sciences of engineering):
- do a list of chapters and titles
- formula list
- definitions list
- redo homework/home assignment
- redo quizzes
- do old exams (ask for it to teachers or older students)
This last point may be the most significant in my study. By doing those exams, you get an idea of the type of questions they ask and sometimes a pattern is visible. For me, I found out that in each exam 4 to 5 questions are asked, one for each ‘big’ subject and that some questions are recurrent.
USE ANY SUPPORT
In Denmark, it is common that during exams students are free to have the material support they want except the internet: books, notes, calculators, dictionaries…
Everything except the internet!
Also, exams are online. I mean, you have to be present at university for the exam, you may write your answer on paper or in Word but at the end you send those answers through a website. The most common platform is WISEFlow. If you write your answer on paper you may ask for a scanner to put your answer in pdf format.
ORAL EXAMS
Orals exams take around 15 to 1 hour. It depends on the subject, year, teacher… The time of preparation also depends. For example:
- Mathematics 1 has only a few minutes of preparation
- General and Organic chemistry has 30 minutes of preparation
In my case, I got the ‘general question’ I may have asked but not the actual problem/reaction I will get at the exam so I know that I may be asked about aldehydes (a type of molecules, in chemistry for example but I don’t know about which molecule, what specific questions. However even if students only get general questions, that is already really helpful since they get to know the points they should put more emphasis on.
CONCLUSION
Danish education has a lot of positive points regarding the exam system (at least the one in my university) and I think it should be more generalised in other countries. Teachers find it more important that students understand how to solve problems and how to think about their solution and criticise it rather than having to memorise formulas and definitions by heart.
One of my teachers told me that in real life and in my future workplace I will have access to books and the internet if I need to check a formula but I will know how to use it in practice. I find that really interesting and accurate.
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