Auditing Funnies

Of course, marks auditing isn’t all about the problems. There were also many funny parts of the process. Some of these students obviously have too much time on their hands during the exam.

There was a paper which I checked, where the student drew a small little cute cartoon at the end of each part of a question. So, there were a dozen or so little cartoons in the answer script. And the cartoons aren’t random cartoons either. They were all relevant to the question although none of them got any marks, which was a shame. The cartoons were actually quite good.

Then, there was another paper, where the student handed in an extra sheet of paper, which did not have anything on it except for a big cartoon, and an explanation of the cartoon. In it, the student explained that there were thirteen sheets of the answer script, and since thirteen is an unlucky number, the student decided to add an extra sheet with a cartoon in it, just to avoid being unlucky. Well, this student is obviously not Chinese, cause fourteen is probably just as bad, if not worse.

There are also some papers where our jobs as auditors were made very simple, by the fact that they got zero marks for the whole paper. Often, I will also find papers where the student had given about a dozen pages of answers, only to be awarded one mark, probably for the effort. It’s actually kind of sad when I see this and when another person can get full marks for the same question, by only answering everything on a single page.

There was even an instance, where the student had the paper upside down. So, the student flipped the page upright and left a short note on the top of the page, stating that the diagram was upside down. There isn’t any problem with this. But then, the problem is with the mark auditing. Not really sure if it was a 6 or a 9 seeing that the page is upside down. Of course, we ultimately work it out in the end.

And although we aren’t supposed to identify any individuals, we cannot help but be curious about any interesting papers that we come across. When we come across someone who scored more than 95% on a paper, we check to see how well that student did in other papers. We cannot really help being a bit nosy. We do the same when someone does very terribly in a paper too.

And finally, there are some students whose scripts are coded to indicate some special status. Most of these are fairly mundane, like being allowed to take their exams in college due to medical reasons or what nots. But there was this special category that made us all curious as to what it means. It was a code for Jewish students. Presumably, these students may not be allowed to take exams on certain dates. So, they may need to take their papers in quarantine.