Final Exam

Thursday morning we had our first final exam in France. Wednesday night was a bit of studying, but nothing like studying at home because none of us really knew what to expect. They gave us a case and another article, and resent us all the powerpoint presentations from the semester. I translated the case and read the article and made sure I knew what was going on with everything. I studied the different theories on the slides because I know how much the French like their theories. We got to have all of our notes for the test, so shortly after 10pm I decided I had done all I could do and got a good night's sleep.
Thursday morning I walked into the room where I was to take the test and found my name among the stickers. Thankfully I was on the top row by the window and not scrunched between people. Earlier in the week I had emailed the professors about writing my exam in English, but since no one replied, I made an executive decision to write my final in English. My French isn't good enough to allow me to write something that transfers my knowledge of the subject well enough. So I commenced with the test along with everyone else. It was the same question 4 times (ok not really, but that is what it felt like). The instructions said to write a maxiumum of 4 pages, so I planned out my time, and my thoughts and wrote exactly 4 pages. I finished 15 minutes early and everyone looked at me like I was crazy.
The strangest part of the whole thing was that after the test we all had to go to the auditorium for a de-briefing where they wanted to discuss everyone's answers to the test. We had all the 3rd year students in an auditorium and they were trying to get people to have a discussion. No one wanted to talk at first and then everyone did! It was crazy. It would have been great discussion to have during the semester in the smaller classes, but not so fun in a huge auditorium with teachers disagreeing with students and the like. I just wanted to be done. I kept thinking, they should have taught us this stuff earlier instead of trying to teach it to us after the test. Guess they wanted to have everything wrapped up all neat and tidy.