Something We Did Not Do

I was in shock two times today. It is certainly not a pleasant experience, and I swear I have added a few more grey hairs to the head because of this.

Whose fault is it? I sat down seriously thought about it, and I nailed it down to 3 individuals, namely 
a) The ignorant
b) The unwilling
c) The irresponsible

At 10.00 a.m., I found out that my students were due to sit for an exam the next day. What?? Where was the letter? There were none in my file that said so. "You sure?" I asked the invigilator in charge. Affirmative, she said. Heck, I was not prepared. More importantly, my students were not prepared.

"How come no one comes to check the room," I asked.

The room is ready, I was told. The examiners had called up to enquire but were not going to check the room.

At once, I turned on my action mode, securing the exam slips from the acting exams sec. The supposed exams sec was on maternity leave. We flipped through the file, in which I retrieved a few sheets of paper with the students' names on them. Students needed to have the exam slips to grant them entrance to into the exam hall.

Then, I proceeded to type up a document with those papers. Funny, I thought. Where were the index numbers? How come they were not indicated? Hmn ... but I never suspected .................................

At 2.00 p.m. after classes, I handed the documents over to the invigilator. She went through them and commented that those were NOT the exam slips. The exam slips were A4 sized sheets of paper with names, index numbers, and name of the exam papers and of course the dates and time on them.

What? Only NOW did she bother to tell me.

But those were the only documents in the file. It only meant that the exams sec did not complete her task. She did not print out the exam slips before going on leave. She had not also informed me or anyone else of this. It was very irresponsible of her indeed.

By hook or by crook, we needed to get the exam slips printed. How? The three of us - the invigilator, the acting exams sec and myself - had to figure it out by ourselves.  We tried to log into the exams website to print out the slips. But no matter how many times we tried, we could not get in. We were all THAT ignorant.

By this time, I was already imagining the worst. Was the system down? Could it be up and running before the next morning? What should I do if I could not get the exam slips printed? Should I inform the exams office? What would they think of our school? We would be the laugh of the whole division as we were SO inefficient! And most of all, the students would not be able to sit for their exams!! They paid RM101 each for this exam. And I was going to tell them that they could not sit for it because the system was down and I could not get their exam slips printed? I was in a state of panic.

As the last resort, I called the exams office in Kuching. A clerk picked up the phone and directed me to 2 websites which did not exist even! I called her back, and she finally passed me to someone who knew how to do it. And with his instructions, we managed to print the exam slips for all students. Phew!

I blame myself for failing to monitor the exams sec for the task she did not complete. I blame myself for my ignorance, that I did not even realise that the exam date is in the exams slip.

I blame my teachers for being unwilling. Earlier on, I needed someone to take over the position of the exams sec temporarily, and one pushed the responsibility to the other. Who wanted extra work, right? As a result, no one really took the responsibility to check, to ensure that everything was done as it was supposed to be.

At the end of the day, this is a good lesson learnt. Anything to do with exams SHOULD be entrusted to someone who is not only alert, but also responsible. Had it been so, no one needed to panic today.