Reports

The University of Barcelona’s Physics and Chemistry Faculty has been host for the last 3 years to the UOC exams in Barcelona. Alongside this site, students in Barcelona can also use the university’s Geography and History Faculty, right at the heart of the city’s Raval district, beside the MACBA modern art gallery. This year, 22,000 people have sat exams in the 56 rooms spread between these two sites in Barcelona. 

As the Director of the Barcelonès Support Centre, Ricard Giménez, tells us, Barcelona plays home to 50% of all the students taking UOC exams. “The students choose where they want to sit their exams. It doesn’t matter where they come from. The UOC allows them to take their exams wherever is most convenient for them. This makes organising things more complicated.” The University of Barcelona’s Sciences Faculty is the only site in use on weekdays and for a reason: most of the exams taken by the students who usually fill its rooms are experimental and thus the building is empty at exam time.

Giménez tells us that they have been working closely with the Teaching Activity Management Department for months. Alongside the in-house team, 100 people are contracted and trained as support staff. The preparation for the exams is an odyssey that begins when the previous exams end with the forecasts for the upcoming semester.

The organisation room is the support centre’s operational centre at exam time. Here there are a couple of coordinators who supervise, among other things, the organisation of the rooms, the distribution of examiners, special needs rooms (for disabled students), etc. There are also the subjects’ academic directors who are in charge of responding to possible incidents that may arise from the development of the exams, such as problems with the exam papers. Alongside these are two four-person teams who are in charge of handling the exams, both in terms of getting them to the students and collecting them again once they have been completed.

Most of the students sitting exams on the last day are people in work who are studying to enhance or improve their professional situation. This is the case of Joan Hueso, a 46-year old teacher studying the Educational Psychology degree. He admits to being somewhat “addicted” to the UOC, where he has also enrolled on the English course in the University’s @thenaeum. Verònica, 36 years old, is studying the Business Sciences Diploma because: “I was unable to complete my studies in Argentina. Fortunately, the UOC has validated many of the subjects I had studied though.” In turn, Trinidad García is studying a degree in Law. She entered the University via the entrance course for the over-25s: “at the UOC, you don’t feel as isolated as you do at other distance education universities”, she comments. All the students highlighted the virtues of the UOC’s educational methodology – a methodology that allows them to combine their work and home life with their studies.

Once the exams have been handed in, they undergo a painstaking and complex process of digitisation. From this point on, paper is no longer involved. The exams, in this new digital format, are sent to tutors to be corrected. This final stage lasts some two weeks, before students receive the definitive results.