Examinations

How It Works

All exams are orals, each exam takes 30 minutes.

An oral exam is fundamentally different to a written exam. If the previous sentence sounds new to you, it is definitely worth to re-state it: An oral exam is fundamentally different to a written exam.

In an oral exam, you assume the mental model of being a hired expert that provides information to a certain customer. The customer pays an incredible amount of money for your time, therefore you should be able to communicate the answers concisely, and (from the customers perspective) address follow-up questions at arbitrary depth.

To me as an examiner, it is important that you can both demonstrate a certain theoretical knowledge (i.e., produce key equations), and also discuss/argue/compare the advantages or disadvantages of one approach over another. While the reproduction can be well addressed by rote learning, the discussion is supposed to be generated on the spot, as a simulated application of acquired knowledge and skills. In each of my lectures, I concretize these statements in the last or second-last class of the semester.

Available Examination Dates in Summer 2019

Available examination dates will be posted here in June 2019, appointments can be made in July 2019, preferably in the lectures.

Examination Registration Protocol:

  1. Make sure that you are registered in meinCampus for the exam. If this is not possible due to your combination of study program and selected lecture, don’t worry. You can still do the exam.
  2. Make an appointment for an examination day with me. You can choose your examination date within certain bounds – typically I offer a variety of dates in each of the four official examination periods of the year. The dates for the upcoming examination period will be posted in the paragraph above, in the month before the registration is possible.
    To make an appointment with me, come to my lecture in January or July, respectively, and sign up for a specific day in the examination list. If this is for some reason not possible, please send an email to me with your preferred appointment. Please note that I receive many emails, so please try to help avoid electronic waste.
  3. You can de-register from the exam until three regular working days before. Therefore, I only assign exact times two or three days prior to the exam, to avoid gaps due to de-registrations in the examination day. Thus, two or three days prior to the exam, I will enter your final examination time into meinCampus and also send an email to you that states the time and place. If you do not receive this email, please send an email to me, for I may have misread/mistyped your address.
  4. Once we set a date for an exam, it is final. Unless you de-registered, I am reserving a time slot for you on that very day. If you happen to become sick or otherwise incapable to participate in the exam at short notice, you have to file the sickness certificate at the examination office. In any case, I do appreciate if you also send a short notification to me (although it does not have any legal meaning).
  5. Rules 1-4 apply. Having said that, “life happens” and there are a few exceptional circumstances that allow for variations. The two most common special cases are: a) something clearly outside of your control happened that forces you to move the set examination date b) you have to repeat an exam, but for reasons of study progress would like to do this one or two months before the first official examination period of the next semester. In these two cases, we should certainly talk.