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On Campus (Part I)

On Saturday, I got up early once again to go to university since I had to take the second part of my French as a second language exam: the oral exam.

The written part last week went well, also it was extremely boring and quite long. It started with an 400 words essay. It took me about 20 minutes to write it, but I had to sit around for the whole hour since I wasn’t allowed to leave. Then, we had the listening part and the reading part (both multiple choices questions). I hate multiple choice questions, I find them very ambiguous. Even as a native speaker, I had no idea which answer fitted best a couple of times. Anyway, I’ll get the result… in three months! That’s right. Apparently, correcting French exams is a very long process… maybe they send them to Paris?!

Once thing that annoyed me a lot was that the person supervising the exam (I’m not sure whether she was a TA or a teacher) explained the words in the test in English. I mean, this is a French language exam… if students don’t understand the questions in French, I don’t see the point. Plus, she couldn’t explain certain words in English, but she didn’t know what the French word actually meant! No kidding.

Anyway, my oral exam lasted exactly three minutes. It may have something to do with the fact I wrote in big bold letter “I am French !” in answer to the question “where did you learn French?” in the preliminary questionnaire. The examiner was a nice guy and admitted there was no point in testing me any further. Phew, thanks.

After the exam, I wandered around in the university, taking pictures.

Hallway
Hallway
Message Board
Message Board
Student Lounge
Student Lounge
Reading The Paper
Reading The Paper
Studying
Studying
Dancing
Dancing
Lockers
Lockers
Library
Library
No BBQ, We Told You!
No BBQ, We Told You!
Lonely Student
Lonely Student
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Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

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