The In-Tray Exam

Doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself! It seems like it was yesterday we started this course on an early-autumn evening in Kalmar, and now it's almost time for the In-Tray exam.

The exam itself will appear on the web site on Friday. You'll find it in Module 4 on the In-Tray Exam page. You'll see another useful page there too: In-Tray Exam procedure. So … what exactly is an In-Tray, and why are you being examined about it?

Your in-tray is the tray on your desk where all the incoming documents are placed. As you work through them, you do your day's work! The In-Tray exam sees you as a temp (worker from a temporary agency, like Manpower) who's been taken on by the three companies in the course. You have to draft responses to various documents that have come in, or situations that have arisen. These responses are going to be in the form of letters of complaint and apology, an internal memo and a brief report.

The practicalities work like this:

• you open (or download) the .pdf document which is the exam booklet
• you choose the particular tasks you want to answer (remember that there are 16 alternatives - four for each company - but you only write four in total)
• you write the documents you need to write …
• and then send them to David, either as e-mail attachments or as print-outs which you put in an envelope (it helps if you put all your four answers into the same electronic document, if you're attaching it to an e-mail, but this isn't compulsory)

What happens then …

… is that I print the document out, mark it in green ink (because people have bad memories of red ink from school!), make specific comments on each task, give each task a mark … and finally send everything back to you. I'll send you a notification of your final result by e-mail, but the actual marked tasks, together with my detailed comments are sent back to whatever address we have for you - so make sure that you've let me know, if you've moved house since the course began in September.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get back to me.