TCFS Final Exam, Day 4: HOI

Today is the 4th day of my final exam. The subject is HOI. Some of you probably is wondering what it is, well, it stands for History of Ideas. In this subject, foundation studies student learn the development of ideas from the classical Greece period to the way it is now in the modern area. It helps students to find their identity since it raises the question on ‘what does it mean to be human’ and ‘how society should be organised’.

The subject it self is sometimes interesting and sometimes just plain boring. This is maybe because at first students did not know what they would get by learning this subject. Students have HOI twice a week, one lecture and one tutorial (just like Maths 1). What makes it sometimes interesting is that though it is called ‘history’, it is different from history subjects in Indonesia. The subject focused on ideas rather on historical facts. The historical facts is only used to prove that a certain idea exist in a particular time period.

The subject covers classical Greece, Roman, medieval, renaissance, 16-17th century and the 18-19th century. Throughout these time periods ideas are developed, created, renewed and so on. The ideas reflects the same question that people are struggling to answer in the modern era… ‘what does it mean to be human?’. Thus, HOI is about finding your identity in the world.

The subject requires the students to write 2 essays. One at first term, one at the second term. The first essay is about defining and explaining ideas from a particular time period. For example, discussing the reasons of the fall of the Romans. The second essay is more of comparing ideas from two different time periods. An example topic is to compare ideas from the Medieval and Renaissance time period. After doing these essay, the students can chooses to do the ordinary or an advanced level of HOI.

The students that took the ordinary level would not got a score for HOI in their final report, they would only got “satisfactory”. While students that took the advanced level would got a score by siting in the HOI final exam, which I did this morning.

– By the way, the HOI score helps students to reach a descent best 4 average for their final scores, this is important because it will decide wether a foundation studies student will go on to University of Melbourne. –

Anyway, back to the topic, the HOI final exam is divided into two sections. In section A, students need to write a short essay (750-1000 words) explaining a thinker from the past 400 years. The essay should explain whether the thinker has a brand new idea that never thought before or if the thinker derived his/her ideas from a previous thinker. In section B, students need to examine extracts from the periods that mentioned earlier (Greece, Roman, etc). Students need to identify ideas, explain them, analyse them and so on.

I really don’t know what to expect from my work today. I prepared the section A pretty well, so I’m confident with that. But in section B, I think I blabbered to much -_-. Well, let’s just see later when the reports are out. Tomorrow is there is no exams, since it is the weekends. The exam will start again at Monday with Maths 2 (i.e. Calculus!). Now it is the time for me to finish this post and start studying!