Yesterday I had my first final exam at my host university. I would not say that my time in Rio de Janeiro simply flew by, but I certainly feel that the second half of the semester was somehow much shorter. It seems as if just two weeks ago I was writing my mid-term exams. Yet here I am, about two weeks away from closing this experience abroad. As with my post about mid-term exams, I am posting pictures of PUC-Rio’s campus. This time I took two pictures right outside the main campus entrance.

The main entrance to PUC’s central campus. Several public buses either go through or end their routes right in front of these doors, making the campus quite accessible.

This week I wrote my Portuguese final exam. It was incredibly short and I suppose PUC simply wants to test how much its foreign exchange students are learning. Rather than bombarding us with fifteen or twenty exercises on the same topic, my professor asked us to complete about twelve sentences in total that tested whether we can use different tenses and conjugate verbs. She also gave us a short reading and asked us to answer two short questions. Tomorrow we will have the oral section of my exam in which we will discuss racism in Brazil.

All of my other classes (Geography of the Contemporary World, Political Economy of Latin America, Brazilian Foreign Policy, and Poverty and Social Inequality) are mainly based on academic readings. Final grades in each class heavily depend on how students do in final exams, so I suppose my professors will be asking for two or three long, essay-type answers for each exam.

Interestingly enough, my four classes (or maybe my four professors) have different approaches to tests. Today my Poverty and Social Inequality professor distributed six essay questions for us to prepare at home, each relating to a particular text we read during our course. For our exam she will choose three of the six questions and ask us to develop a relatively long response for each. While this may seem rather simple, she expects us to incorporate our in-class debates into our responses, turning our exam into quite an interesting exercise.

My Brazilian Foreign Policy class will also have a “traditional” exam. We will be given three essay prompts that ask us to compare different authors, theories, and historical periods. This will certainly be my heaviest exam in terms of the amount of content I will need to prepare and study. Luckily, this has been my favorite course at PUC-Rio and it will be quite interesting to look back and realize how much I have learnt about Brazil and Latin America through this class.

The exciting moments of my next two weeks will most likely come during my Geography and Political Economy exams. These two professors have a very interesting approach to final exams. They both believe that having students simply reproduce what they have already read in academic texts does not show how much they have learnt. Instead, we will be given a newspaper article (or an image in the case of Geography) to analyze using the theories and arguments we have studied so far. My professors’ objective is to determine whether students have developed the skills to put new knowledge in practice.

This was probably not the most entertaining post of my semester, but I wanted to give you an idea of how different academic systems may be abroad. About 60% of my final grade for each class will be based on these exams. My experiences at the University of Richmond and at PUC-Rio have been different in this aspect, yet I am confident both systems have allowed me to learn immensely.

I will definitely let you know how my exams go!

Step outside PUC’s campus and you will find several options for a quick lunch or even some Acaí (a highly popular “drink” made from the fruit of a particular palm tree.)

[Taking pictures of my classes during exams was not a real option for this post, so I am sharing with you some pictures of PUC’s campus during a beautiful rainy day in October.]

This is where you can find the International Cooperation Office – a fantastic and very helpful team!

Five classes and five mid-term exams. One of my major concerns about studying abroad at PUC-Rio without having taken some Portuguese classes was writing exams. Your time is limited, looking up words in a dictionary may make you lose some valuable minutes, and what you write simply may not make much sense.

Apart from my Portuguese language class, four of the courses I am taking at PUC strongly rely on reading, writing, and analyzing texts. I knew in every class I was going to be asked to write an essay as a response to a question. I was nervous, definitely. But how did it go in the end? Well, I am not sure yet. But let me tell you what my experience was with these exams.

I hope you read one of my previous posts in which I wrote about PUC’s grading system. To summarize that post I can say that PUC grades students mostly based on two exams per semester, allowing those who study here to have some space to work and have internships outside their time at the university. This made me think during the first two months of my semester that my exams would be very heavy in terms of content and would require me to carefully do the assigned readings for each of my classes.

And yes, I was right. Two of my professors told me that what we had done in class was not extremely important for the exam. “Everything will be based on the readings,” my professors told me. I spoke to my four professors before the exams to get an idea on how I should go about studying, and every single one of them told me to simply do the readings and not worry about their in-class lectures.

One of my favorite places to read on campus

Coming from UR, this was quite a new approach for me. I could not understand how my professors’ great in-class lectures were not important for my exams. I have four classes on Brazilian Foreign Policy, Latin American Politics, Contemporary Geography, and Social Inequality. If you are into social sciences, imagine how fantastic it has been to see professors teach how these topics relate to Brazil (of course, being in Rio de Janeiro and doing all of this in Portuguese makes it ten times better.) But hey, “that does not really matter as long as you do the readings” seemed to be the general rule.

My experience at UR has been quite different. Of course, you always need to do the readings and get through those assigned books. Yet you can expect your exams to also include some questions about discussions, projects, papers, assignments, and many other aspects of your courses. Both at PUC and UR I was asked to analyze a particular subject based on what we had done in my course. The difference is, and this is just my impression based on my first round of tests, that at PUC you can do well in those exams by attending classes, preparing each reading, and learning the dry, classing theory for each course.

Now, before I close the post, let me be really clear that I am not suggesting you should not go to classes when you are abroad. I can guarantee you that your exams will not go well if you pretend you can read 15 papers before your test and sit there analyzing a new question in two hours. Understanding how my professors tackle each question in class using our readings was essential to write my exams. How did my tests go? Well, I still have not got results back, but let’s all hope everything worked out.

PUC’s main road on campus. It was a beautiful rainy day in October