Here’s a round up of all of this year’s biggest exam blunders

You’ve been slogging through the night, you’re at maximum stress levels and the sunlight now hurts your eyes because you’ve hardly stepped outside for weeks. The final hurdle to overcome before your suffering ends is sitting that exam, and the last thing you want is an error in your paper or a dopey invigilator.

But as exam season comes around, these fuck-ups always happen, and this year there have been a lot.

So here’s the round-up of this year’s worst.

King’s, second year Bioscience

In a Physiology and Pharmacology exam, calculators were taken away from students for most of the exam, stopping students from completing the calculations section of the paper.

Birmingham, third year Economics

Three out of six questions in a Game Theory exam paper were ‘unanswerable’. They were either missing information, contained counter factual information or were unreadable.

40 minutes after the exam started, one question was clarified and after 70 minutes everyone was told that three questions were unanswerable. Students were told to make the corrections on the exam paper, and invigilators only allocated 15 minutes of extra time to make up for the confusion caused by the errors.

Birmingham, third year Civil Engineering

The university forgot to give students their Geotechnical Engineering exam paper, who sat at their empty desks for 45 minutes waiting for their paper to be printed.

A student told The Tab: “One of my coursemates went to the toilet in the 45 minutes and heard our lecturer laughing over the phone about the situation.

“Exams were printed in such a rush, some students had back to front papers, pages missing, all printed on different colour papers. In fact, the papers were still warm from the photocopier.”

Leeds, third year Business

300 third years were left angry after their Strategic Management exam was cancelled last minute because the university forgot to print six pages of case studies that accompanied the paper. The 9AM exam was cancelled at 9.25AM and students were told the exam would be postponed until 3pm.

Durham, first year Philosophy

Philosophy freshers were told to answer the wrong number of questions in their Knowledge and Reality exam. They’d been told throughout the year that they’d have to answer three questions in two hours – however the exam paper stated that they should only answer two.

The department apologised for the “very unfortunate experience”.

Newcastle, second year Psychology

A fire alarm went off during a Biological Psychology exam. It rang for about 30 seconds before students were told to leave the hall. They waited outside for five minutes before being called back in to continue with the exam.

Newcastle, first year Law

A law fresher thought he was going to be forced to choose between taking an exam or having his weekly blood transfusion when his request to have the exam rescheduled was rejected. Luckily his Head of School intervened and exam date was changed.

Edinburgh, first year Geography

Invigilators disrupted three exams taking place in one hall several times to inform students of multiple errors in a Geography paper using a microphone. Linguistics and Economics exams were also taking place in the hall, and these papers also each contained a mistake.

Bristol, Third Year History

A lecturer accidentally uploaded the exam paper onto Bristol’s online learning platform Blackboard before the exam took place. A substitute paper was provided for the exam.

Reading, Third Year Psychology and Language

Students were shocked to find they were given last year’s exam paper for Introduction to Speech and Language Pathology – the only difference between the two papers was the date. Every topic had changed since the previous year, making the old exam paper impossible for the current third year students to answer. Some students walked out of the exam after the first five minutes, while others tried to answer the paper.