Taking care of the exam responsibilities has left a mark on many of the persons involved in the process, as will be revealed in the exam supervisors’ and country-coordinators’ texts in the following articles. For lecturers of international degree programmes, being part of the student selection phase opens up a better understanding of the societies, backgrounds and realities of the foreign students that enter the Finnish UASs. Conducting the exam process abroad is therefore not solely a question of accomplishing a given task. It is also a learning process where new insights are gained from new cultures, people and ways of doing things. All this is beneficial for the further development of both the admissions process and international degree programmes.
Things do not always go as planned beforehand, and thus the process of conducting the entrance examinations abroad is constantly developed based on the experiences and feedback collected from the country coordinators and exam supervisors. Some of the challenges are fixed on the spot, in the best way
possible in the given circumstances. Some of them will be further analysed and discussed back in Finland and acknowledged when drawing up the plans for the next round of exams. Good practices and novel ideas are obviously also shared and harnessed for future use.
An example of the occurred progress in the exam process can be detected for example in the amount of paper: as will become quite apparent in the exam supervisors’ stories, conducting a paper-based exam to hundreds of applicants means quite a bit of planning when packing the carry-on luggage. Ensuring the data and exam security is a main priority, and hence handling all the exam papers is a form of art. To ease the task of destroying the extra paper and to lessen the weight of the exams carried back home, those responsible for drawing up the exams have been challenged to compress the information into a neater form, which has happened commendably. The next stage of entrance examinations will soon be introduced in Finland as the Finnish- and Swedish-taught UAS degree programmes will start using a digital exam. This would be a natural development also for English-taught degree programmes – at least in Finland. While moving on from paper-based exams is considered, exam supervisors and paper exams are needed until the digital exam is shaped into a format that can be securely and reliably implemented abroad in countries whose infrastructure differs from Finland’s.
Travelling to distant locations with colleagues from other UASs is also a way of learning. While over the years more and more people have gotten to know each other better in the network activities, many times the exam supervisors do not know each other beforehand. Parallel to taking care of a demanding work assignment, the exam supervision trips create possibilities to get to know new people, exchange views with colleagues from different organisations and study fields, and build professional networks. Even if the trips are conducted within tight schedules, there are times when the supervisor peers can sit down and enjoy the experience: those willing to take up the challenging task are often ready and willing to work hard and at the same time be open to influences and vibes brought about in the foreign environment.
According to my personal experience, these trips and the countless incidents within them – be they desperate, humorous, frightening or triumphant – produce unforgettable memories, many times marked with laughter and a sense of success. Since the joint efforts in the entrance exams have produced good results measured both in numbers and the quality of student selection, it is possible to conclude that the FINNIPS exam supervision is, on many levels, an example of cooperation at its best.
REFERENCES
Vanhanen, R. 2013. FINNIPS Entrance Examinations outside Finland. In R. Vanhanen, H. Kitinoja & J. Holappa (Eds.), FINNIPS – Joint Efforts for Internationalisation.
Publications of JAMK University of Applied Sciences 155, 78–87. Accessed on 14 March 2019. Retrieved from http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-830-278-3
The Finnish Network for International Programmes (FINNIPS) is turning 10 years old in 2019. I have been actively participating in the network for seven out of these ten years assisting the student recruitment process in Hungary.
As I am originally from Hungary, I became the perfect candidate for acting as the country-specific coordinator in Budapest. I practically organised the entrance exams on site in cooperation with a Hungarian partner university;
I also handled the pre-registration and on-site registration and supervised the exams. The 30-40 students that on average participated in the entrance exams made Hungary one of the “easy-breezy” exam locations, especially compared to countries like Nepal or Vietnam in terms of applicant numbers.
Hungary is also a special place for the reason that most applicants want to study in Finland because they are passionately in love with Finland. Weird, right? Every year we have applicants who surprise us by speaking some Finnish, for example. They are usually super eager to show off that they have managed to learn a bit of one of the world’s most difficult languages, just out of sheer enthusiasm for the country. It might surprise you, but Hungary is full of hardcore Finland fans! Quite many are in love with Finnish heavy metal, some are nature lovers, and others just simply love Finland. Without a doubt, Finland has an excellent reputation in Hungary, in terms of everything.
For some reason, Hungarians know more about Finns than vice versa.
Hungarians are, for example, much more aware of the language bond that Finns and Hungarians share through belonging to the same Finno-Ugric language family. Every Hungarian child knows about the Kalevala and can list at least five words that sound remotely similar and are taught in the school to show how the languages are related. As a person who had to learn Finnish, I would say it’s fake news, ok? There is hardly any resemblance and Finnish is still super difficult to learn, even for a Hungarian. But ok, there is actually one sentence that is used as an example to “prove” the relation; I leave it up to you to find the resemblance:
In English: A fish (that is alive) swims under the water.
The same in Finnish: Elävä kala ui veden alla.
And in Hungarian: Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.
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