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In light of a global pandemic, I thought I’d share my experience with this exam season as a postgrad physics student at @ucl. Firstly, UCL did a brilliant job of catering to students and taking the stress off our hands by facilitating us with generous exam timetables. #exams 1/13
Four of my exams were given week long deadlines (168 hours). One of my exams was a 24 hour paper (maths exam) and the last one was an intercollegiate module I took at my undergrad uni @qmul which was a 48 hour paper. Additionally, I had a research essay due before exams. 2/13
The essay had an extended deadline which made it easier to complete to an acceptable standard. The week long exams all went very smoothly in terms of time management and having that amount of time meant I could rewrite my solutions neatly and scan everything properly! 3/13
Now here’s where the struggles begin. The 48 hour exam was okay and I did manage to finish everything, rewrite it all and scan my answers but it was a lot more stress than the week long exams. The 24 hour exam started 6 hours after the 48 hour one was due! 4/13
I spent 18.5 hours (slept for 5.5 hours halfway through the paper) on that paper as it was the same difficulty as the other exams (due to the open book nature) but with much less time to complete. This meant I woke up at 5am to finish, rewrite, scan and submit my solutions! 5/13
I was actually rather close to passing out during the 24 hour paper but I managed to get it done either way. This I would say was a very stressful exam to complete as it was “at most” a 5 hour paper but my house really isn’t catered to exams like halls are. 6/13
UCL also dealt with EC forms very well. For the week long exams (or “coursework” as it was called) you could have self-certified EC’s with automatic week long extensions granted at the minimum. Some had overlapping exams or something else so needed this. 7/13
Peers from other unis have mentioned they had 3 hours to complete, scan and submit their exams! As you can imagine most have struggled with this as a lot of us (especially BAME) students live in cramped and noisy conditions making it near impossible to complete these exams. 8/13
To conclude, I’ll make recommendations for all unis to consider if they have to run online exams again next year. Don’t set 3hr, 24hr or even 48hr papers. You don’t know what situation your students are facing and can’t assume their homes to be suitable for such exams. 9/13
The week-long “coursework” style exams are far more suitable. This accounts for time-zones, students mental/physical well-being and living conditions. In fact, this could even replace the current exam format altogether and be more reminiscent of real-world work. 10/13
Overall, I think all universities should consider this and UCL could lead the way. Some will say the open-book nature makes the exam easier. Whilst true for some, for problem-solving subjects like physics you’ll need to understand the method to solve the question. 11/13
For those that have gotten this far with the thread hopefully this gives you an insight in some way. Hopefully other unis take the @ucl approach with this and place their student’s well-being first. 12/13
To end this thread, here’s a pup! (I actually just realised I had 12 paragraphs not 13 
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