Neither of those are a problem in my 2015 Tesla Model S for the buttons that control the climate control or media player.
It seems to me that many of the problems that people report related to touch controls are more to do with how they are laid out than the fact that they are touch controls.
> They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.
That's odd, I would expect any employer for whom the class of degree mattered to know the reputation of the university. For instance second from Oxford is probably going to be as desirable as a first from Oxford Brooks (formerly Oxford Poly).
How long is too short? Each exam in my BSc Applied Physics final (1977, Exeter Uni.) was three hours and we had similar exams in each of the preceding years to weed out those who weren't keeping up. I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.
In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project to my supervisor and another senior academic. And it was clear that they had actually read it.
All those exams were open note; anything in your own hand or a copy of a lecture handout was permitted. Again the weaker students would not have been helped by more time because they hadn't understood that you have to have enough familiarity with your notes to be able find the right information. Some brought in 50 litre rucksacks stuffed with ring binders and the noise of them furiously leafing through was enough for the invigilators to warn them to make less noise or risk being ejected.
In Norway it is typical that an exam of similar standard allows five hours.
If your school just had you silently reading Shakespeare they were doing it wrong. It is meant to be performed and watched, his works are plays and poetry not novels. I was lucky, my English Literature teacher in high school was a (very) minor playwright and well aware of how important speaking the lines out loud is, and how watching a play is so very different from reading it.
Not having interrupts isn't necessarily a problem. In fact if you want to be sure that the processor behaves deterministically then you might choose to not have interrupts. I remember seeing an article about the British RAF commissioning a CPU design and explicitly forbidding interrupts for that reason. Unfortunately I don't remember where I saw it so I can't check to see if my memory is faulty.