here's just a brief sketch of what finals are like here in ole ghana

now, do remember that the university of ghana is considered to be one of the best universities in africa. one of my profs went so far as to say that he thinks its one of the top ten unis in the world. now i find that laughable, but you see what im getting at...it does have some sort of reptuation as a respectable institution.
first of all, the whole semester long the international students have been told that our exams would be held at the same time but in a different location as our ghanaian peers. we were to be sequestered in the great hall so that our exams could be graded separately and therefore faster...then on the first day of exams, a notice was printed stating that we would indeed be taking them with everyone else, so we had better look up the locations....
i had my first exam on the second day of exam period so i set off to campus early so i could look up where i had to go. the exam schedules were supposedly posted in all the dorms so i popped in the first one on the main drag. however, the schedule for that day had already been taken down... of course.... soooo then i wandered all over trying to find a schedule that said where my exam was taking place oh, you know, just in the next hour or so. fortunately i did find one outside the library and made it on time.
around this time a rumour started brewing that all the international kids had/could/should (no one really knew which) change their exams to all be before the 12th. exams were supposed to run until the 20th of may, but apparently one of the international programs got the date wrong so their kids had plane tickets back home on the 15th. so i had a final on the 20th, but no one really knew what i was supposed to do about it... the problem was solved when i ran into my religion prof who assumed i needed to change it. we made arrangements to move it up. as i was the only foreign student in the class, it wasnt really a big deal. though i was generally advised not to change it since profs apparently have a habit of losing exams taken separately...of course, they do... as you can see, communication isnt really a strength of this renoun institution.
well then, the actual exams. re-diculous. i found that the perfect amount of studying was to read my notes two to three times prior to the test. i should add that i generally only had about ten pages of notes (in a notebook the size of a blue book) for most classes... all of my exams--geography, poli sci, religion, social work, you name it--consisted of six essay questions. you picked three to answer and had two to three hours to do it. you were expected to write approximately 3 pages on each...front being one page... so really, you had to learn about three things from the whole semester... brilliant! our whole grade pretty much rests on these exams. in fact, i only had other assignments in two of my classes. but, a 70 percent is an A and something like a 40 percent constitutes a C, what i need to get transfer credit at GW. so in sum, i congratulate the university of ghana on my easiest, stress free exam period to date :)