University forgot to give final year Civil Engineering students their exam paper

Students had to wait 45 minutes for their exam paper to be printed

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Yesterday, UoB final year Civil Engineering students sat down to an empty desk for their last exam, Geotechnical Engineering.

The undergraduates had to wait 45 minutes after the exam was meant to start before the papers were handed out. Students ended up being in the exam venue, The Great Hall for four hours in total.

There were other exams occuring at the same time, so the distribution of the exam paper was inevitably disruptive for other students. The exam continued to be a shambles when pages in the paper were missing and printed back to front due to the rush of printing. Even the invigilators were clueless as to what was happening.

A third year Civil Engineer 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.”

The University of Birmingham responded to the event: “Exam papers are printed by the University’s Printing Services, it was not intentional to print only part of the paper. Once this problem was noted an emergency, the print job was undertaken to copy the missing pages, and from my understanding the Senior Invigilator in the venue gave students all the full time that they would have missed whilst the paper was been copied.

“We will endeavour to meet with Printing Services to discuss what may have gone wrong and to ensure that this does not happen again.”