Weird Exam experience 2

Ok maybe I'm going on about this a little bit but the exam practice here is definitely alien to me. Today I had an exam scheduled to start at 10am. It started a little bit late, that's fine I guess. We even sat apart from each other this time! I wasn't even that perturbed that I was the only person not to know how long the exam was before asking (apparently all exams are 1h30 mins, it is not necessary to write this down anywhere).

But the exam itself... I may not have spent a huge amount of time revising for this exam (I grant you, for many people circa one week is NOT their definition of a small amount of time) but I still learnt quite a lot, I think. There was certainly a lot of interesting stuff to learn. What somewhat wrongfooted me is that the exam consisted of a pretty small number of questions, all requiring non essay length answers, and that lots of the topics we mentioned just didn't turn up. I know the idea is you revise everything just in case (or leave stuff in the forlorn hope it won't appear) but I could have got a pretty high mark while ignoring a reasonably large amount of the course. 15 out of the 40 marks for one half of the exam came from stuff we were told in THE LAST LECTURE OF TERM. Which for the record was on Thursday last week! I shouldn't be complaining because even the paragraph length essays were hugely harder to write in German than in english, but it does feel a bit lax.

The most confusing event of all is when the first guy to finish brought his paper up to the lecturer. The lecturer then glanced through it and loud enough so the whole room could hear, explained to the guy what he had left out of an answer to one of the questions! He proceeded to send back several people he didn't think had written the right thing for that question. Maybe it could be seen as him correcting an ambiguous question, but he probably should have just written it differently in the first place?

For the record I don't think there is anything too evil going on here, there isn't some conspiracy to defraud english students of hard earned degrees, and I'm not trying to imply that my 'vast london brain' or whatever makes a mockery of puny austrian education. I think we must just have very different opinions of how university works. An austrian course such as this is valued as 2/3 the work of the standard one term course we do at UCL so you might expect there to be less in it, but I really thought the quality and content in the lecures was close to the full UCL one, if perhaps with less assignments (homework, if you will). Perhaps they don't check up as much on your further reading here? That means any you do is well and truly for yourself, which in the UK means you wouldn't do it. Heck, maybe you don't do it here either! But there are a lot more individual courses, 12 different subjects in a year instead of UCL's 8, so I think this slightly more relaxed exam system might make it easier for students to prioritise the things they really want to study rather than being spread too widely. The actual amount of detailed knowledge at the end of the process might end up about the same.

Or maybe the austrian university system is just so underfunded and overcrowded this is the only way lecturers can do it, it must be worse for the degree programmes where people are literally unable even to sit down on the stpes of the lecture theatre because they are full!

2 more exams to go, I'll let you guys know if my opinion changes (I am expecting a giant Murphy's law exam of death after this)

Just so you know I'm not the only one confused, here is a link to a friend's poston the same subject:
http://williamnaylor.blogspot.com/2010/01/being-foreign-student.html

Now I have figured out how to do links too! Hurrah for me.