Let’s take a look at the biggest exam catastrophes of 2018

Excuse me, I think you’ve given us a paper with answers written in it?

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Every year the universities manage to mess up the exams in one way or another. Every. Single. Year.

We hear so many cases where students are given questions which are impossible to answer. We hear about the annoying invigilators and their phones going off mid-exam. And we hear cases of students being given exams which literally have the answers written in the paper.

It's actually mental. EVERY YEAR.

So, here we are. Exams are now over, and it's time for the national round up of all the most tragic exam fuck ups we've heard about this semester.

Oh my, some are TRAGIC.

Edinburgh Uni managed to lose four exam papers after the exam

Four Edinburgh Law students faced everyone's worst nightmare when they received devastating emails from their school a month after their exam saying that their papers had gone missing.

The school had searched high and low for their papers, but their attempts in finding them had been unsuccessful.

The school apologised profusely, but at the end of the day, all they could do was offer the four students the chance to resit in August. Alternatively, they were given the option of doing a small take-home assignment over the summer.

After spending months revising and getting worked about an exam, the last thing you'd want to hear would be this tragic news. Neither of the alternatives the school offered were ideal for any of the students.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 10/10

A UCL exam paper contained questions which were actually impossible to answer

This UCL exam went pear-shaped when the students were given papers which contained major errors which made some of the question unanswerable.

Three out of four questions in the exam contained mathematical errors. The Engineering school were aware of said errors, but the invigilators did not announce them to the students before the exam commenced.

As well as this, the students were given the wrong formula book to go with the exam, as well as an insufficient amount of time to answer all of the questions.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 10/10

Warwick exam paper contained questions which were on topics not found on the syllabus

The strike action at Warwick didn't appear to be taken into account when the exam papers were being written, as the papers contained questions which related to topics that were not taught due to the missed lectures.

An email had already been sent out to all Warwick students, informing them that material that was not taught as a result of the strikes would not come up in any of the exams.

Despite the certainty expressed in the email, this proved not to be the case and many students were left scratching their heads in the exam hall as they tried to tackle practically unanswerable questions, based on the material they'd been told to revise.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 9/10

Edinburgh Uni gave out papers which had the answers written on them

Another Edinburgh exam went drastically wrong when people realised that the answers for the multiple choice questions had been written in bold on the papers.

The multiple choice section of the exam was worth a whopping 65 per cent, so I'm sure many students used this to their advantage, but it also left many students displeased at the school's sloppiness.

Frustratingly, the decision made from above was that the multiple choice section would be discounted when the papers were being marked, so the essay question once worth 35 per cent, was suddenly worth 100 per cent of the paper.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 7/10

Durham exam faced last-minute changes due to errors in the questions

Durham students had to sit an exam which contained three errors in total. The student were told of these errors before the exam, and they were written on a board at the front of the exam hall, but it definitely put a lot of students more on edge than they already will have been.

Fifteen minutes before the end of the exam, someone came into the exam hall to tell students about yet another the error in the fourth question – an error the students had not been told about before the exam commenced.

By this time, many students had wasted valuable time trying to figure out the solution to the impossible-to-answer question.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 7/10

Durham Maths exam paper contained errors which were only mentioned in the last 40 minutes of the exam

Students were left confused as they attempted to sit an exam which contained many errors which were not highlighted by the invigilators.

Many students stated their concerns to the invigilators walking around, but there was no formal announcement to all of the students until over two hours in.

The students sitting the exam were advised how to replace the incorrect information, with what was meant to be there.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 7/10

UCL students were given the exam paper from the year before and told to carry on

A group of UCL students were given an exam paper from 2016/17 instead of the 2017/18 paper.

The invigilators told students to continue with the exam, even though both the students and the invigilators were aware that the incorrect exam paper had been distributed.

40 minutes into the exam, another paper – the correct one this time – was issued to the students, and they were told to start working on the new one.

The main issue with this error though, was that the paper from 2016/17 was designed to be a three hour exam, whereas the 2017/18 paper was only two hours. This left the students a bit confused as to which parts of the old paper they should answer, and which parts of the correct paper they should answer.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 6/10

Durham told students that there was an error in the paper to later reveal that there was no error

With 20 minutes of the two-hour exam remaining, Durham students were incorrectly informed of an error in the final question. After the exam ended, the students were then told that the question was correct after all, and would have been answerable.

It all started when a student raised a concern regarding a question during the latter half of the examination. In a state of panic, the invigilators decided to alert students of an error in the question, so not to waste any more time.

All this did was complicate things, as the question had been correctly written, but this only got recognised as the exam was drawing to a close, by which point many students were less with an inadequate amount of time to write an answer for it.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 5/10

Brookes Law exam had to wait in silence for 40 minutes while additional booklets were found

An exam hall full of students were furious after being made to to wait 40 minutes in silence all because there weren't enough exam booklets for everyone.

The students had to wait for the additional booklets to be printed, and were told that they may not talk or leave the exam hall whilst they waited.

Many students made complaints and asked if they could take a break and have a look at their notes, but this was not allowed.

After this ordeal, the students then went on to sit the two hour exam.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 5/10

Cambridge exam paper riddled with typos

This brings us back to the time when Physics students were issued an exam paper which contained typos, one which made a question unanswerable.

These errors were identified in the first 20 minutes, but some students had already wasted a significant amount of time trying to answer the unanswerable question.

Many students found this unfair as they'd spent valuable time trying to answer something they would never be able to answer.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 4/10

Music blasted out of a PA system midway through a UCL exam

Over 2,000 UCL students were left annoyed after loud music blared out of a speaker system during their exam.

The loud music lasted for around six minutes, so it was not short-term distraction. The invigilators decided to ignore the disruption in a very "ignore the problem in hope that it'll go away" fashion.

Many students complained about how distracting the music was, and how little it helped when they were trying to answer some very difficult questions.

Exam Fuck Up Rating: 3/10