Results week is underway and a number of Durham University students are awaiting marks after yet another gruelling exam period.
Whilst academic pressures have been lifted for summer, a number of errors during exam season were noticed by students who blamed the university’s job cuts for typos, missing line references, and missing booklets during tests – a claim which Durham University has since clarified to simply be “human errors.”
Durham University has also clarified that out of 700 examinations, only six were affected.
Included in the exam blunders was the A Level 2 History paper on Law and Disorder in the Barbarian Kingdoms, which was mistakenly substituted for some students with a paper on conservation in Africa. A number of students later emailed their lecturer and department over the swap, after being confused.
The paper was later taken down at 9.43am and one minute later an announcement was uploaded on Learn Ultra stating that the department was aware of the issue and would be in touch shortly.
At 10.01am, a new alert was sent saying that the correct paper was now available, and in compensation for the error the exam’s submission time was shifted forward by an hour, leaving students until 10:30am to complete and upload their work.
Another second year student claimed that her Level 2 History paper – from a module on The History of Modern Ukraine from Borderland to Bloodland – repeated the exact same questions from last year “word for word.” She told The Durham Tab that the “department haven’t said anything about it,” and suggested that it gave those who had planned essays for this paper before an advantage.
Other mistakes were also reported by students, with one second year English student taking an Old English paper telling The Durham Tab that the paper “had no references of line numbers or titles for the extracts for the entire ‘seen translation section’.” This left her scanning for names and uncommon words to identify the text, which students were not expected to do in past papers.
In a Level 2 American Poetry exam, a quotation from Emily Dickinson’s The Red — Blaze — is the Morning featured a typo, with”And” mistyped “Abd.” The second year English student told The Durham Tab that, whilst this information was incorrect, they “did not care” about the error as the question remained understandable.
Another second year student reported an erroneous use of “mass” instead of “density” in a probability question during her exam last month. The student told The Durham Tab that “it didn’t really change anything,” but argued that “these mistakes are the fault of the [university’s] job cuts, rather than the [hard-working] staff who would usually not make these mistakes.”
Durham University clarified that the institution has not been through a programme of redundancies, but instead is offering a Voluntary Severance scheme.
According to Times Higher Education, a Durham University spokesperson said that claims the university’s voluntary severance scheme was responsible for exam errors are “entirely without evidence.”
However, again according to THE, communications officer for the UCU branch Katie Muth said that these “redundancies” had made a “pinch-point” period “even more difficult.”
According to Palatinate, the Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics 2 engineering exam was also disrupted as the data table booklet was not handed out until three quarters of the way through the exam. The Chair of the Board of Examiners, Simon Mathias, told students: “We were able to print and distribute the missing booklets by 16:00, but we fully recognise that this left you with only 30 minutes to work with materials that were intended to support 60 minutes of exam time.”
A Durham University spokesperson said: “The University had over 48,000 exam sittings during the May/June examination period.
“While the vast majority of these sittings ran smoothly. If any issues do arise, we have procedures in place to minimise the disruption caused to our students, and to ensure this does not impact on outcomes.
“We do this through our Boards of Examiners who pay close attention to cases where students may have been impacted by factors out of their control.
“We review the operation of exams annually through our Examination & Assessment Report and consider improvements to address any issues identified by students or invigilators as part of that report.”
“The claim made by Durham UCU that errors in a small number of exam papers were due to staffing changes is wrong. Exam papers were set well before staff began to leave the university under the current voluntary severance scheme, and the process change referred to is entirely within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, not affecting the Department of Engineering. The errors were simply human errors.
“The picture painted of the exam season by Durham UCU is similarly erroneous. Six errors have been identified, from 700 exams, and 48,000 sittings. The vast majority of exams ran smoothly.
“If any issues do arise from exams, we have procedures in place to minimise disruption to students, and to ensure this does not impact outcomes.
“In the case of the Engineering exam, our severe adverse circumstance process is being followed. In the case of the History exam, the error was corrected quickly, and students given extra time to complete the exam. The other four errors were minor typographical errors.”
