As a result of such a good reception to my recent post about my early bank career (The great night safe robbery). I thought I would regale you of an incident, of which I still chuckle about, that occurred during my academic career.
I was a member of an invigilation (fancy term for supervisor) team, supervising a final exam. It was being conducted inside a very large lecture theatre, so there was a number of other staff members mixed in with the usual exam supervisors. One of the team was the course co- coordinator for the particular subject being examined, who had also written the exam.
After the obligatory speech to all students regarding, cheating, toilet breaks, and exam finishing protocol, the timer started and the students commenced.
As was my custom on these occasions, I always held a copy of the exam paper, in case there were any particular student questions that may occur from individual printing errors. Additionally, reading through it was also a way of passing at least some of the time of an otherwise mind numbing two hours.
It was whilst reading through the first part of the exam that I noticed something quite odd. The first section was a multi choice and required the student to answer by colouring in with a pencil, one of 4 circles with either an A, B, C or D printed inside. The answer sheet was separate from the questions and comprised 40 rows down the page of these little circles with letters in them.
It was on the answer sheet, that I suddenly noticed that the first question options, had one circle printed in a much lighter shade. And it wasn’t long before it also became obvious that every row of ‘answer options’ had one option printed in a distinctly gray shade as opposed to the standard black of the other choices.
It would certainly not take Einstein to work out that these odd coloured answers were indeed the ‘answers’. And any astute student that glanced at the sheet for more than a millisecond would certainly see the same.
I rushed over to the course coordinator (as subtly as one can in an exam room) to bring this to her attention. On showing my discovery her facial expression certainly conveyed to me that this was quite the predicament. “Unfortunately, it is too late to stop now” was her instruction, adding that there was no reason to think that students would ‘click’ as to why the printer interspersed the colour gray onto the answer sheet.
And strangely, she was indeed correct. Exam tension, coupled with constant switching between question and answer sheet, ensured the most obvious of visual clues failed to be perceived. The exam actually provided a standard distribution of results – amazingly!
Thanks for reading, next post will be the usual investor education I promise, until then thanks for reading and if you haven’t already take the chance to read about my top 11 flnancial planning tips.
