Technical Difficulties

After more than a month, the Form 4's finally finished their exams this week and the last one was Computers.  As their computer teacher and considering that most of them had never used a computer when they started two years ago, I was a little concerned.  The first day was the theory portion which did not go very well and I was not too happy about.  Questions concerning ways to increase processing speed, procedures for mail merge, and DOS commands seemed somewhat out of place.  The students felt pretty beat up afterwards.  The practical exam held in the college lab the next day was much more in line with what the students were prepared for, but I think a few of them panicked even after I specifically instructed them not to making it more difficult than it should have been.  As their teacher, I wasn't officiallly overseeing the exam, but I was there to assist with any malfunctioning computers.  Just after the test began, I watched a few of them open their heads, take out their brains, and place it on the desk next to the monitor.  Unfortunately, since I could not instruct the students after the test began, I was unable to advise them that this was not an exam in which body weight was important and they would need their brains despite how difficult it would be for them to hold up.  Inevitably some of them forgot what to do with the floppy disks I passed out at the begininng, said very clearly were for saving all of their files, and spent the week running up the exam reviewing how to use.  Others, while trying to remember how to get the disk into the computer, pressed the power button which I specifically pointed to on each computer and warned them to never press under any circumstances.  I watched as one student spent precious time clicking on every button in the window except the one she should have.  Some faced the typical problems that happen while using computers, but as I said before, chose to panic only making the problems worse.  One girl accidently deleted all her data while using Excel.  Instead of staying calm and using the Undo command as I showed them in class, she closed the progam trying to find it back and lost it for good.  She had enough time to start over and still finish, but she cried instead.  The official exam proctor, unexperienced with this reaction, actually asked me to see if I could get it back for her, but it was to late.  Another almost lost it right at the beginning of the exam when she could not get the cursor to do exactly what she wanted.  After I said that I couldn't help her, the tears were on their way and she stood up to leave.  I gently pushed her back down into the chair, told her to calm down and finish.  She did, but I don't know if she fully recovered.  Overall, the execution of the exam went much better than expected.  The power didn't go out once and nothing blew up.  I believe many of the students did much better than they think even though they weren't very happy with the exam or with me for not answering their questions while they were taking it.