December exams riddled with mistakes have angered students already under strain from a chaotic semester. An Architecture MA exam has had to be rescheduled after the teacher accidentally uploaded the answers instead of the exam. Staff also had to issue apologies for two Maths exams where typos meant the questions were impossible to answer.
Postgraduate Architecture students were sent a message after their ‘Architectural Management, Practice and Law’ exam had already started, saying ‘please stop working on the exam now’ because they had been given the answers instead of the question paper. The 24 hour exam was meant to take place on 17-18 December, but now the paper will be reissued and they will be given more than three weeks to complete it.
An anonymous student on the course explained that the exam is ‘specifically about professional practice which is why it was so ironic that such a mistake was made’. They also said that ‘it’s the only exam we have this year so it’s just a massive fuck up. This module was meant to be complete this semester so dragging it on (until February) is just going to be super annoying for everyone.’
The School of Mathematics also faced an end of semester fiasco as two separate undergraduate exams contained significant mistakes. Yalda Janebdar, a third year student, explained that in her Statistical Methodology paper, ‘the thing they wanted us to prove was just wrong. A lot of people, me included, spent ages trying to prove it. We got an email with 10 minutes left of the exam time telling us the sign was wrong.’
The same thing happened in an Honours Differential Equations paper, but they were only told about the mistake after the exam. Janebdar expressed concern about the errors, saying ‘They said they’d be fair about the marks for those questions, but what about the time we lost on trying to prove the wrong thing?’
Numerous petitions and protests have already emerged over the University’s ‘hybrid’ learning approach, and these exam mistakes have further fuelled students’ dissatisfaction and anger, with no sign that next semester will be any different.
Image: Anonymous