Edinburgh Exam Fail!

Reading through past papers is one of the best ways to grab a hold on an impending exam, and imagine the feeling of relief when you open up the paper, to find a question you’ve effectively already answered. For one group of Social Anthropologists, that’s exactly what happened.

(Insert motivational revision quote here)

The students, who were taking the exam in Drummond Street, organised by the Student Disability Service, were handed out last year’s past paper of the Social Anthropology 1B exam that they were meant to be sitting.

Jack Alexander, one of the students sitting the exam, said that “I thought it was peculiar that we got the same paper as last year, but I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. I suppose it was really to my benefit as I was more comfortable with the questions that I had already seen, even though I hadn’t actually practised any of them.”

It’s always handy seeing the paper beforehand.

The University’s Student Disability Service organise having a separate room for students with additional needs like learning difficulties and disabilities, to allow for extra time to be added and to accommodate for any additional requirements during the exams. Since I take my exams in this room myself, I know usually how hard they work to organise everything, and usually respond well to any mishaps (including having a guide dog Labrador trying to enter the exam room), so we’ll allow them this one slip up.

On finding out there was an mix up with the paper, Jack told us “I assumed we’d have to resit the paper to make things fair for the other students, but I was surprised that they were more concerned about making the whole situation more difficult for us.”

So overall Edinburgh, setting a past paper as the actual exam probably wasn’t the cleverest things you’ve done, but we’ll forgive you. As Jack said to us, “all in all, I think I got a great deal out of their mistake,” so everyone’s a winner.

At least it wasn’t this much of an exam fail..