On Monday, the students the students had their theory exam. Meanwhile, I was discovering that I can indeed sleep from 4:30am to 2:30pm: ten hours, and most of them during my normal waking hours. Admittedly I was helped by my changes of timezone, but it was still an impressive effort. I woke shortly after 10, because someone was vacuuming outside my room (I think it was vacuuming: I was never awake enough to make a positive identification), but I remarkably slept after that as well.
The day was labelled as "morning off", but with our only activity beginning at 5:30pm, it was more like "day off". I joined my colleagues for lunch, and if my memory serves me correctly we chatted until it was time for the excursion.
We visited Uxmal, site of Mayan ruins. The first pyramid we saw as we entered was quite spectacular. I may at some stage have photos from others who were there, but I didn't take some. If you have seen my photos, you'll know this isn't such a bad thing: combine a rather unskilled photographer with an old photo and the result isn't very impressive. The good thing about a digital camera, though, is that you can take so many pictures eventually one will be good, so I'll post such photos. Anyway, you may need to take advantage of Google Images to find your own examples of pictures of Uxmal.
At Uxmal, we saw the sound and light show. This really wasn't very impressive: nothing like the sound and light show at Cowra. It really was just some coloured lights, along with a bit of story about what went on at Uxmal. We would far rather have been there during the day, when we could have climbed the pyramids and looked around properly.
After the sound and light show, we went to a restaurant for dinner and happy hour. They seemed quite keen on wining and dining us (especially wining - the dining I can understand because we have to eat somewhere, and it might as well be somewhere with good food), although I only took advantage of the free alcohol on one occasion. My Spanish is limited to "Agua... si... gracias", but that served me well.
We arrived back from Uxmal at a reasonable hour: before midnight. Unfortunately, my long and unusual sleep that day meant that I simply couldn't sleep that night. I think I had 15 minutes around 2am, and finally fell asleep for an hour at 6:45. Certainly not the best preparation for one of the busier days of work.
In the morning, the International Board met to discuss the experimental exam. After the theory exam, we were worried that it would be a "recipe book" lab, involving no need for physics skill or the ability to think. Fortunately, this was not the case: it involved just the right amount of instruction to point students in the right direction, leaving an appropriate amount of theory for a lab exam, and certainly points of experimental technique to perform suitably. I was also very impressed with how the representative of the academic committee presented the exam. If people wanted to change something, he would tell us why it was written the way it was - he and his colleagues had usually thought about the issue that had been brought up - and make sure everyone understood. Once that was done, he didn't try to defend it further. I feel it's very easy to get defensive when people try to change "your" question, or go to the opposite extreme and let people do whatever they want, even if they haven't thought about it as much as you, so I was impressed that he found the correct middle ground. We didn't change much in the exam, and what we did change leaned more towards giving less instruction than giving more, so we were quite pleased.
Fortunately the organisers had improved the printing situations by providing a small number of reliable black and white printers. We therefore only had to print the colour pages on our dodgy printers, and the process went much more quickly.
Around this time we were given the students' exams to mark. We spent the late evening (until around 2am) looking at these. I guess our students went about as well as we expected, except that they didn't do as well as we would have liked on question 2 (we later found out that question was very poorly done overall). There were several places we could argue for more marks, but it would really depend on what the markers were willing to give credit to.
The next day was our main rest day, a trip to Celestun. This is a beachside town, famous for its flamingo habitat. We went on a boat trip around the estuary, and saw quite a lot of flamingos. I've attached a picture.
We then headed to the beach, for lunch at a seafood restaurant, complete with the customary open bar. This was the one occasion where I did have alcohol: a shot of tequila. It was significantly easier to drink than I expected, and I would have no problems drinking it again.
The following day (I'm up to Thursday, now) was set aside for moderation of the theory exam. We found out the cutoffs for the awards, which were somewhat lower than we expected. We were able to form a strategy to make sure our students received the awards they deserved, and began moderating. We did reasonably well on question 1, where the markers seemed happy to give us partial marks for partial work. On question 2, we had a lot of trouble picking up marks for propagated mistakes. The mistakes were substantial, but we still would have liked more generosity here. The third question was a bit in between: we picked up a few marks, but the markers spent a lot of time talking about things among themselves and didn't always give us what we thought our students deserved
In the evening, we looked at our students' lab exams. On the whole, they were marked well and generously, so we didn't expect to pick up all that much. One student was a bit of an exception, because he had done a couple of things in a slightly odd way and set some others out unclearly, so he had a lot of useful work they hadn't really noticed. We hoped that we could get at least a high fraction of the several extra marks we thought he deserved.
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