I have just returned home from taking my Semester One final
exams for the Associate in Business-Marketing program from Penn
Foster College. All I can say is this: thank God it was on open-book exam. It doesn’t help, of course, that I have not
worked on a lot of this material in almost two years, but I’m not using that as
an excuse. Overall, I think I passed
most of the exams. The fact that Penn
Foster is a nationally-accredited distance learning school should not lead
anyone to believe that translates to “easy”.
One of the things that really caught me off guard was the
amount of time I had to take the exams.
I had five hours to take six exams.
I thought I had six hours, but apparently Penn Foster feels that two of
the exams should take no more than half an hour each. Here are some of my observations about the
exams:
Business Orientation:
This was the easiest test of all.
It probably took me about 20 minutes to complete, and it consisted of
about 10 short-answer questions. It had
questions like “what are some of the things you should consider when writing a
mission statement?”
Information Literacy – This is another one-credit course,
and I believe students are allotted about half an hour to take it. I think it actually took me 40 minutes. Know your Bolean search methods.
Introduction to Business – This was another relatively easy
exam, consisting of short essay/short answer type questions. If you are generally familiar with the
information in the textbook you shouldn’t have much of a problem.
Principles of Marketing – This exam killed me. It took a lot of my time, and I had to look
up a lot of information in my text book.
The first half of the exams consisted of questions which required essay
answers totaling 15 to 20 sentences in length (yes, they specify this on the
exam). My cursive handwriting is
terrible, so I had to print all of my answers.
I should have tackled this exam first.
I do think I did reasonably well on it, however.
Mathematics for Business and Finance – This was the course
that took me the most amount of time to finish, and I believe I had a 95
average going into the exam. That’s
good, because I did not answer two of the questions on the exam. They were algebra questions that did not even
look vaguely familiar to me, so I skipped them and did the questions I could
answer. That might have cost me
dearly. I’ll have to wait and see.
Principles of Management – I was running out of time when I
started taking this exam. I answered the
first three essay questions, which were worth 20 points each. After that, I was out of time. I’ll probably have to retake this one.
One thing that confused me and my proctor was the 15 minute break I'm allotted during the exams. Does that 15 minutes come out of my exam time, or is it basically a "time out" and not count against the five hours I have for exams. We weren't sure. If I had been allotted six hours, like I originally thought
I had, I would have finished all exams and probably could have gone back and
worked on the two math problems I skipped.
Oh well. A retake or two is
probably in my future. Next semester, I’ll
be sure to finish all courses in a timely manner and immediately take the exams
afterward while the information is fresh in my mind.