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I challenge you all to beat my stupidity! Worst mistake you've made in an exam?!

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My friend completely forgot about an exam. Just didn't turn up, only realised when we had another exam together and I asked where they were. This was in the 3rd year of uni.

Reply 381

CpnCornetto

Mispelt my own name at the top of the exam sheet having to ask for a new paper 15 seconds after the man had said
You may now turn over your papers

Also recently in an ICT mock went a bit loopy and wrote about ambulances causing power surges to make a system crash
Don't ask

I also just remembered a psychology essay i handed in in As
I misread smearing faeces on walls as smearing faces on walls
turns out it didn't matter because the teacher put it down to a spelling error
Untill we analysed the essay in class and i mentioned the faces

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 382

paulmch

I very nearly forgot to write my name on a Physics paper last year, the invigilator was 3 desks away when she was collecting the papers before I realised! :biggrin:

Reply 383

GeorgeLegg

A friend of a friend of mine made the mistake of not revising for their test.

They committed suicide by shoving two pencils up their nose and crashing their head down on the desk.

:ahee:

Reply 384

chembob

Original post by GeorgeLegg

A friend of a friend of mine made the mistake of not revising for their test.

They committed suicide by shoving two pencils up their nose and crashing their head down on the desk.

:ahee:

That made me shiver

Reply 385

CpnCornetto

Original post by GeorgeLegg

A friend of a friend of mine made the mistake of not revising for their test.

They committed suicide by shoving two pencils up their nose and crashing their head down on the desk.

:ahee:

Just another of the many classic exam horror stories
You heard about the kid who swung back on the chair during his GCSE's
he fell back and broke his spine on the table behind
This is now why the exam invigilators must have the big gap nothing to do with cheating etc
There are soo many of those

Oh and all of those stories end up with results day being that all their papers came out 100%

Reply 386

LewDacris

answered a question from a different exam board in my final biology A2...because i had read the chapter thinkin it was in our sylabus.....

Still got a B in bio (2marks from A)....

If only i had answered right Q

Reply 387

kerily

I took C4 in January. Got the results back, was 2 UMS off what I needed for an A* in maths. So I looked at the mark breakdown with my teacher, and I'd done everything perfectly except for the first and last question, each of which I'd only got half marks for. The last question was fair enough because it was a right cow of a question, but I didn't think I could have lost 3 marks on elementary trig, which I can normally do in my head. So we sent it back for a remark and I also put in for a resit.

The resit paper came back, and I looked at my script, as the mark hadn't changed. It turned out that actually, I had lost 3 marks on the first question. For reading a 2 as a 5, and vice-versa. I'd lost one mark for saying '2 sin alpha = whatever' when it was '5 sin alpha = whatever', one mark for saying '5 cos alpha = whatever' when it was '2 cos alpha = whatever' and then one mark at the end for getting the wrong value of alpha.

That's three marks. And that's why I don't have an A* in maths.

(The depressing thing is, I have synaesthesia and 2 and 5 are the same colour when they're attached to another word or phrase, so I've always found them difficult to differentiate between. On its own, 2 is red and 5 is green, so it's fine - but when they're written as coefficients of something, they're both a sort of light green, so I find it really, really hard to read the difference.)

Reply 388

Deutsch_Beth

Sitting two exams on two different languages, often within hours of eachother, is a very dangerous thing :tongue:

The amount of times I've spoken French in my German oral or vice versa, or written half an essay in German when its meant to be in French, realised and had to re-write it.

Also not really stupidity just me being a bad student, I once wrote a Welsh exam essay in German because I couldn't remember any Welsh, and in my final Welsh exam I learnt 20 set phrases and just alternated them throghout the exam. There were other exams for Welsh I behaved in but still, was surprised to come out with a B.

Reply 389

inspiringsoul

Original post by DopplerEffect

Yes it is a huge problem, :frown:

Apparently, the scripts are scanned and the scanned images are sent to the examiners, and pencil marks come light in scanning or not at all.... Apparently I have lost marks due to this mistake... :frown:

4B or 6B pencils won't be a problem though, they are as dark as pens...I wrote with HB pencils..

hmm, but arent we supposed to draw diags in pencil? like for chem, the apparatus n stuffs? :s-smilie:

n coming to pencil, i ve answered sm of the ques by pencil once :frown:

i guess thts where i lost marks!

Reply 390

krish.x

3 divided by a third =1 instead of 9. On an Fmath paper. That's right. Further maths.

:facepalm:

Reply 391

Destroyviruses

I forgot to but the

x10^-3

at the end of an answer i did multiple times.

And I mistook 520 for 502 or whatever number it was. Got the Born haber cycle all wrong.

And I missed/forgot part of the instructions so lost marks. I have some selective reading issue.

Oh and forgetting to put units is a classic.

Reply 392

DopplerEffect

Original post by inspiringsoul

hmm, but arent we supposed to draw diags in pencil? like for chem, the apparatus n stuffs? :s-smilie:

n coming to pencil, i ve answered sm of the ques by pencil once :frown:

i guess thts where i lost marks!

In school, you are supposed to use pencils for diagrams, graph,
but as the question paper instructs, write in black/blue pen... That means everything has to be in ink, I even drew graphs in pencil previously, now, I am told that I have to draw with pencil first then redraw over it with ink...

Reply 393

IndigoRockGirl

I once answered 20 essay questions rather than 3, because the instructions were unclear and I stand by that! :teeth:

Reply 394

S_123

Original post by lawology

The worst one I did was in psychology, where it was a 2 part question and held the most marks on the paper.

The first part was to describe a study, I did that quite confidently. The second part said 'evaluate your answer'. In a panicked exam frenzy I didn't think it through and didn't evaluate my answer in terms of refuting and supporting evidence as you might expect in a psychology essay...oh no. Instead, I actually evaluated my answer as in 'Overall, I thought my answer was quite strong - paragraphs 1 and 2 particularly so...' and, even worse 'However, my answer is perhaps made less reliable as several figures used were educated guesses rather than strict facts...'
:colonhash:

This makes me want to be an examiner just for the lulz of answers like this haha! Love it! How did you do may I ask?

Reply 395

CJKay

When the exam board for my Graphics GCSE asked me how I might collect secondary research and give detailed instructions, I informed them of the amazing tool that is "the Google search engine" and its "in-your-face 'Search' button".

Reply 396

Locke54

Back when I was doing GCSEs, which is so long ago my memories are sepia tinged, I slept through an entire Maths module exam. Somehow I managed to come out with a B overall and I still have no clue how I did that when I was doing Intermediate Maths (B is the highest grade you can get) and I missed one whole exam worth of marks :s-smilie:

Reply 397

chlobofro

Missed out three pages of an exam paper because the pages were thin >.<

Reply 398

Tootles

Worst mistake? It wasn't in the exam itself for me, it was before: I smoked a four-skinner with some mates. Realized afterwards that I had an exam, and I went in and dribbled all over the paper, absolutely fried.

The funniest thing?

Spoiler

Reply 399

S_123

Original post by infernalcradle

was in a History AS exam.....the question was about black rights in the US and how they changed through the actions of various presidents etc....

I ended up writing about presidents, saying they did things or faced problems that either didn't exist or that they simply didn't do.....

somehow managed to get 100% in that exam :biggrin:

I read that as 'black knights' and was reading intently to see what you'd written haha : laugh: