By Maximilian Livshin, Year 13
The new Sports Center at LGB is certainly a state of the art facility, and the school should use its capacities to the fullest extent. From indoor soccer to fitness rooms, the gym has it all. This Sports Center has room for countless different activities, and the school even wants us to take our exams there; as an IB students, should you be worried about this?
During the construction period of the gym, as most of us can remember, white tents were scattered around the school, where gym class was to take place. Obviously, these tents were not particularly well insulated from outside noise, and hence exam taking was moved to the Salle Communale in Chêne Bougeries, as it had been in previous years. This led to mixed reactions from our school community, ranging from students being happy to not have the noise of the younger grades bothering them during the exams, to people who did not want to have to travel the extra distance to the new venue.
This issue was supposed to be solved now, since the new Sports Center is completed, right? Well, not quite. The school decided that our Year 13 mock exams would be held in the new Center…at the same time as other grades having their scheduled gym classes. The so-called designated exam room, Gym 3, is situated right next to the second largest gym space in the complex, and there is no real noise insulation between the two rooms. This exam room has quite good insulation for noise from the outside, and even noise from the main gym area on the bottom floor is negligible, however everything that goes on in the gym next door is heard loud and clear in the exam room. As you can imagine, the noise can get very distracting when taking an exam.
Even so, you still have nothing to worry about for your future exams. This is as we have been reassured that for the actual IB examination session, which lasts four weeks, there will not be any classes in the gyms, meaning taking exams in the Sports Center will be just fine.
