The MML faculty recently announced that many of its exams will be subject to a significant change in format.

The Modern and Medieval Languages department sent out an email to its cohort on Friday (07/07), informing students that many of its longer, take-home examinations will now be conducted in much shorter timed conditions. They will also have some additional opportunities for coursework.

In the document laying out these changes, students were told that many of their exams will now become “5-hour timed online examinations”. They will continue to have “access to resources” for some of their papers rather than sit them as closed-book exams, but are given five hours instead of the previous three days. Student will continue to perform the assessment “in [their] own space using [their] own device”.

Both the email and attached document were keen to emphasise the replacement of the previous “tranche” system. MML students will no longer have set blocks of three days, called “tranches”, in which they completed each take-home paper in whatever order they chose. For next year’s assessments, timetables will be organised by the faculty.

These changes will apply to faculty “scheduled papers”, set modules which focus on aspects of culture and history surrounding a language. The document stated that “Introduction to language and culture papers” and “Linguistics papers with LI prefix” would be exempt from the changes. Other “language papers” are set to remain in-person, having reverted to the pre-Covid format in 2022. However, they will have an extended duration of three hours.

For Part II students, these scheduled papers will also mean an additional “combination of coursework and online open-book examination”. One of three questions per paper will be coursework to be completed prior to the exam, and will be weighted as such.

According to the email seen by Varsity, the department took into account the findings of “extensive staff and student consultations” when deciding on the changes, as well as the “scrutiny” of “the Undergraduate Studies Committee and Faculty Board”.

Whilst other faculties such as English have transitioned away from online assessments for 2024, languages students sitting exams in the next academic year will continue to have less “traditional invigilated in-person examinations”.

This applies to MML and HML students, as well as those from another tripos borrowing a language paper. The email also says that assessment formats for Linguistics students under the MMLL faculty are “currently being finalised” and “will be communicated [...] in due course”.