VENEZIA – All things considered Linda Conchetto, Virginia Gonzales e Lucrezia Novellothe three students from Foscarini who, after the bad grades in the version, refused to answer the questions in the oral exam of the final exam, were all promoted. For the oral test, in which they simply read a protest speech, they were each awarded 4 points out of 20 and their final scores were 65, 67 and 71. All 14 students in the class succeeded to pass the exam but, with a few exceptions (including a 100), the majority of the final marks were between 60 and 80, certainly not terrible evaluations, but not superlatives either, considering that the class had boasted good results over the years.
«BETTER A ZERO»
While the teachers and the school principal continue not to release statements, the students, after having seen the final grades, expressed their opinion on the matter. They all explained that they would have preferred to get 0 pointsso that an even stronger signal was sent, and that the class’s grades could have been higher, but that the commission was too severe.
«I’m not sure what they evaluated to give us 4 points, perhaps it’s a civic education grade. I was a bit perplexed, maybe it would have been better not to evaluate us – Virginia comments – during the oral exam they absolutely wanted to show me the version, but I didn’t want to because I found it humiliating. I did see what the right translation would have been, I certainly made some mistakes, but not enough to justify a grade of 7/20. I also know that I did well on the text analysis questions, but they were probably not counted. They also made different corrections to different people, contradicting themselves. Our class has always been a generally very good class and the teachers have always appreciated us, but the values expressed by the grades of the final exams reflect those of a very mediocre class. However, we are happy that some teachers we have had over the years and who were not part of the exam commission supported us privately by complimenting us”.
“They probably reasoned at the level of civic education, giving us points as if we had answered only one subject,” Lucrezia adds, “none of us wanted to be evaluated, but they decided to give us 4/20. However, there are some kids who took the oral exam and in total they got less than us. They didn’t give the girl who got 100 honors because she got 19/20 in Greek,” she continues, “many times they try to give 20 to give honors to those who worked so hard. In the version I had made fairly marginal errors, some were a question of synonyms, but the whole version was marked in red. I will try to understand from other experts if the mistakes I made were worth the grade I got or if the commission was very harsh,” she concludes, “I did some soul-searching to understand what my responsibilities were for the bad grades, but it didn’t seem to me that I had made such serious mistakes.”
Maturity, the protest of the 3 students from Venice: they showed up for the oral exam without taking the interview. Eventually promoted
THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND
«Honestly, I would have appreciated a zero more because what we said wasn’t for the vote but it was an ethical issue, comments Linda, giving us 4/20, they showed that they didn’t understand what we meant. Several errors in my version were minor. Many online comments said that the correction of the version is collegial and that the college should have intervened if there was an injustice, but the problem is that only one of the internal professors knows Greek and the others could not contest the corrections. We have always been a very good class, he adds, and we entered the exams with very high credits, we were good at the essay and whoever took the oral exam did it well. In the end, however, the grades, even if they are not very low, are lower than we had hoped for, so much so that many of those who thought they would get 80 or 85 got around 75. It’s not bad, but for those who struggle to get a good result It’s not much.”
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