Second-year Business Management students were left disappointed after an unexpected error occurred on their exam paper.
The students sitting the Logistics exam on Thursday May 21 found that instead of a set of data which students were expecting to use during the exam, the answers to one of the sections were contained in the appendix.
It was after an hour into the exam when an invigilator announced that section A was void and that students should answer two questions from section B, instead one from each section as planned.
But a second-year student who was in the exam said that section B was undoubtedly the more difficult of the two sections.
“Some hideous questions came up in section B,” he said. “Everyone was just really disappointed because section B was definitely the harder section.”
Another student sitting the exam said: “It’s a bit unfair. Some of us had done more work on section A – I personally found that section easier and it is quite a difficult subject anyway.”
The exam gave students 22 topics to revise. One student on the module said that a preferable situation would be to change the current weighting of 30 percent coursework, 70 percent exam to depend more heavily on the coursework.
Mistakes have also been made elsewhere. In a Human Resources exam held on Friday May 22 in City Hall, students were subject to a mid-exam lecture from one invigilator after a girls’ mobile phone went off. They were given no extra time at the end of the exam to make up for it.
This is not the first time the University has come under fire from students for the lack of protocol for when things go wrong in exams.
gair rhydd reported last month about the chaos that ensued after a power cut left students sitting their exams in the Great Hall in darkness.
Mistakes contained within exam papers is no new thing either, the printing of answers in question booklets made headlines in gair rhydd in 2007 when medicine students were told to leave their exam half-way through. This time it was because some last minute photocopying meant some students received the answers in their question booklets.
These students were required to sit the exam a couple of days later regardless of whether they received answers or not.
The second-year Business Management students sitting the module have not yet been told what is going to happen about their marks but have been told that the Business school will be in touch.
As gair rhydd went to print, nobody from the University was available to comment.
