Transcript in exams?!

My friend had the same thing, but he was allowed to use a word processor for all his exams. Others please correct me if i am wrong, but isnt a transcript a copy of the exam paper?

thats what i thought a transcript was, though when i asked in the additional support department they said my teachers would read them

hey all
i wasnt sure what to call this thread because no one seems to have heard of it before
basically i have messy handwriting. its something i work on but i just cant get it any neater. Im allowed to word process some of my exams- but not all. Apparently i get something called a 'transcript' where my teachers read through my exam papers and check everything is readable before sending it to be marked?!
has anyone ever heard of this before or has this themselves?
thanks

I can't understand why you are allowed to use a word processor in some exams but not all, it seems most odd. The only reason I can think is that it is for exams with short answers and they expect your work to be legible but will just give it a quick check.

For a transcript, someone who is familiar with your handwriting, but does not teach you for that exam, attempts to make sense of what you wrote. You are not allowed to be involved in this process. Depending on how hard it is to read, they can either photocopy your script and write their take on occasional hard to read words above the word, or re-write the whole thing out again. The examiner will attempt to read your script but will refer to the transcript if they get stuck. (If you get your marked script back you might find annotations similar to '2 marks from transcript').

Making a transcript is an incredibly laborious process to do properly for essay subjects - I estimate that to produce a good transcript of a bad script takes about 3 times as many man hours as the exam took and you still land up with the odd indecipherable word. To do it properly takes 2 people, one to give it their best shot and then someone else to bounce ideas off for the tricky bits. Ideally, the person doing the transcript also needs a decent knowledge of the subject they're transcribing or it is even harder to identify the words and if , for instance, they don't know that alkanes and alkenes are different things then it is easy to make a mistake in transcription.

I hate transcripts.