Dear Students at the Centre for Medieval Studies,
Because of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and online delivery of courses and exams at U of T, the CMS Latin Committee has decided that also the Centre’s Latin exams in April 2021 will be conducted online through the University’s Quercus site (see below for more details).
Important Dates and Information
Students who are planning to take the Latin Exam on April 12 (Level One) or April 14 (Level Two) need to register via email with Rhonda Marley by April 1, 2021. At the moment of their registration, students are asked to indicate whether they need any accommodation for writing the exams which needs to be registered with the U of T accessibility services. Students in different time zones should indicate their time constraints at the time of registration.
CMS will communicate to students registered for the exams all the details concerning the exams by April 5, 2021.
Writing the Latin Exams online
The Committee has decided on using the following hybrid system, already tried out successfully in September 2020.
Exams will be conducted online through the Quercus site (accessible with students’ credentials for registered U of T students and via temporary guest access for students who have not yet registered and for external participants). Live support and monitoring will be offered to the participants in the exams by members of the Latin Committee through a video-meeting on Zoom. Students will not be recorded while taking the exams, nor will a browser lock-down software be used. However, the Quercus software does note when users navigate away from an open exam page, or to another application (though it cannot record what students are viewing, only that they are no longer actively viewing the exam page).
This hybrid system will ensure equal conditions for all students, conditions which are comparable with those normally obtaining in on-site, in-person exams. This effective and friendly monitoring was successfully implemented during the April Modern Language Exams at CMS. The hybrid system also includes configuration strategies to ensure that the needs of students with special needs are accommodated.
Students are allowed to print the exam if they have access to a printer, and to write their draft translations on paper, although they need to enter the final version of the exam on Quercus and submit it within the time of allotted 3 hours (students with time accommodations will submit according to those). Students who wish to print and work on paper need to alert the invigilators that they are choosing this option, so that Quercus logs with long periods of inactivity can be accounted for. As always, no aids of any sort are permitted, except in the case of students whose first language is not English, who are permitted to use a modern language dictionary (English-native language). Students who choose to use such a dictionary must alert the invigilator of this before the exam begins.
For additional information about Quercus, please consult "How To Take an Exam in Quercus."
For additional information about Zoom, please consult the Zoom information page.
For the Latin Committee,
Dr. Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Chair