Exam system at the University of Bologna (Forli)?

Hiya! 

I studied for 6 months in Forli in 2014/5 (I had a great time, everyone is very welcoming, you'll make some good friends there!) and at first the exam system didn't make much sense, so don't worry if you take a while to grasp it. Fundamentally you will be studying 4 or 5 modules in a term, but you're not obligated to take all the exams if you have enough credits to skip one, so they're quite relaxed.  As an erasmus student you can also take modules from any year group, so I actually took a class with masters students in interpretation (I definitely recommend this if you need to improve your spoken Italian!) Most of the exams are oral exams (needless to say they are conducted in Italian), and the professor will ask you some analytical questions about the topics they have asked you to study. The trend with courses such as linguistics or history seemed to be that the professor would give you one book to read, and the questions would be based on something from that book, so in that sense you don't have too much to learn, just make sure you read the book! This makes it a bit easier than a written exam as you can probably speak faster than you can write so you can express more points. You may be expected to do a presentation too, depending on the course.  If you take translation however this will be a written exam, and they'll give you a short excerpt to translate, (you will have a monolingual dictionary!), and you will probably have covered a similar excerpt with similar vocab in the classes. In terms of the difficulty of the exams...well, for the Italian students, they're hard. For erasmus students, the fact you turn up to do the exam counts for a lot, and they're very aware of the fact that Italian is not your first language so you will not be able to express yourself as well as your classmates! They just want to see that you've done some work, so if you're able to say basic phrases, but give good points, you will get good marks. The hardest exam was the translation exam, because in this instance both you and the Italian students are on a level playing field so you don't get any special treatment! 

I hope this makes sense and answers your question!