The Student Room Group

Is it just my school or are your invigilators useless too?

Sorry, this is going to be a bit of a rant as I have just come out fuming from an exam. I want to know if it is just my school that have such bad examiners/ exam officer or if it is the norm.

First off, actually getting entered for exams was bad enough. Some people who applied and paid for a retake within the deadline have not been entered yet a year 8 with the same name as me has been entered for A level biology (good luck to her :p: ) My friend whose aplication for a remark was also completely ignored.

Then in the exams themselves the invigilators have done things which must be against the rules. For example using their mobile phone in the middle of the exam (actually in the room) to ask for extra supplies. In a gcse exam today the examiners misread the timings and the exam was stopped 10 minutes early so an official complaint had to be made.

During my exam today we were timetabeled for a room that was far too small for the number of people taking the exam so we all got moved into the main hall where another exam was going to take place. Eventually we were seated, told the instructions and started. However, they then proceeded to organise and read out the rules for the other exam, once our exam had started, completely distracting us.


Argh, and this is my first exam so god knows what is to come. Am I wrong in thinking that these few hours of our lives determine our future and that it should only be the student, if anyone, who makes the mistakes during this time? I really wish they took these exams as seriously as we do.

end of rant (written very quickly and in fustration so sorry for any spelling or grammatical errors, I know how they offend some people here :cool: )

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At my old school they have an exam invidulator who's son was sitting the exam he was monitoring! He then went round and during the middle of the exam picked up people's papers and started flicking through them (even though they hadn't finished).
Reply 2
i think its just your school never happened to me before in the past or present
Well my exam officer kept reading things wrong today for some reason. Turns out that she lost one of the lenses of her glasses. D'oh!
Reply 4
Nope, its not just you. I agree, the examiners at my school were USELESS! They'd volunteer for it (i think) then spend most of the time complaining that they have to be there! lol
Reply 5
<3beloved<3
i think its just your school never happened to me before in the past or present


This has never happened to me in the past either so it has really started to worry me now that it is my A level year. I put all the organisational problems down to the new exams officer, who seems to think her job is 75% smoking break 25% sitting in office. However, cannot think why the standards of external invidulators has fallen :s-smilie: Maybe a very unlucky coincidence. I don't blame the school, it is my last day tommorow and throughout my time there the school itself has been brilliant. Grrrr...why does this have to happen now?
During my Eng Lit this morning they had various different AS & A2 exams going on. They were all shorter than our 2h 15m one, so during the last 1h 15m there were people trooping in and out - at one point we had three groups in 15 minutes entering / leaving! Not good!
Reply 7
Get this: in my exam there were only a few of us. Some builders with strimmers were cutting down trees, so the noise of the strimmers I could hear despite the fact I had headphones on for a language exam with the volume on full. It was hugely distracting. Isn't there any other time that these strimmers can cut down trees? If I recollect the same thing happened last year and people complained. Clearly nothing happened. Why can't builders do the work in July or August? or early morning or after 6pm, not in May and June.

The invigilator was pacing up and down (I was right by the front) he think started checking my pass about 5 times through the exam. There were only 5of us taking the exam and we'd been in the exam room for about half an hour before the start of the exam chatting so he could have checked them then, and in fact our teacher had come in to verify who we were anyway. I think at one point he was checking my pencil case which contained only 2 biros and was see-through!

He started the exam late reading the instructions and then chalked up on the board 5 minutes later than his watch which was 5 minutes out of synch with the wall clock ie after the start of the exam he read instructions, so there were 3 different times: the clock when we actually started, what he verbally told us and what he chalked up on the board.

One exam I did a few years ago, they got some elderly woman who was blind, confused and had a speech impediment to read out the invigilator instructions, but she took so long the exam started 45 minutes late, which meant I was rushed and hassled for the afternoon exam. Basically I was fuming, because I wanted the lunchtime to go over some last minute revision and grab something to eat. Instead I was running into my afternoon exam in a frantic state.

One of my friends at her college they forgot to submit her IT coursework so she got a crappy mark so her uni place was cancelled. Once the college submitted it she got her grade she was predicted but by that stage she had to take a year out.

In one of my other friends at her school they lost her coursework.

Clearly I think the exam board should issue information sheets to schools: no noisey builders, only check ID once.

Also in my college despite there being warnings that if mobiles go off you will be excluded from exams, in one of my exams last year some boy had his go off and he was sitting behind me. It's not surprising really as in class the pupils mobiles go off and people just walk out of class to finish off the conversation. Really the teachers should massively clamp down on any mobiles in class or lessons. I mean - can't they switch it off for 2 hours? What is so important?

My other gripe is people turning up late for exams. In our college, we've had students stroll in half an hour late to an exam that is only an hour long. Then all the clatter of people leaving because they feel like it. I mean they know the exam is an hour or 2 hours, and all exams are tough, so why the turning up late and walking out.

Examiners work out strategically just how long it takes to do an exam, therefore people wandering out and even worse, the hullabaloo of them chatting along a corridor I find very selfish and distracting.

Turning up late and leaving early people should be shot. Especially when I know some of the students live 10 minutes away.
we had people talking at the back of my french gcse, not even about the exam, just general chit chat, in my IB i had to shout out because the guy at the ront was looking the wrong way for so long about giving me paper....
Reply 9
There's a invigilators in our sixth form who just falls asleep all the time.
Reply 10
These people are not examiners! The people who MARK your exams are the examiners. The people who SUPERVISE your exams are the invigilators (yes, spelt like that, and not in any other weird ways I've seen on this site :p: ).

And in answer to your original question, no, I've never had any as bad as that. If their behaviour is distracting you then you should speak to the person in your school who deals with exams (this is sometimes the bursar/finance officer; sometimes it is a senior member of staff).
Reply 11
Angelil
These people are not examiners! The people who MARK your exams are the examiners. The people who SUPERVISE your exams are the invigilators (yes, spelt like that, and not in any other weird ways I've seen on this site :p: ).

And in answer to your original question, no, I've never had any as bad as that. If their behaviour is distracting you then you should speak to the person in your school who deals with exams (this is sometimes the bursar/finance officer; sometimes it is a senior member of staff).


Thanks Angelil.

I did realise the mistakes you pointed out, I was just in such a bad mood I didn't correct it :p: I had a very stressful day- sitting an exam next to my twin sister who became very distressed in the middle of the exam, talk about distraction! :rolleyes: Feeling much more relaxed now.I have told teachers and so have a number of other students, but I don't suppose anything will be done until next years exams. The other problem is that most of the invigilators are parents of friends or teachers, making it harder to complain.

It is a shame that others of you have had to go through similar experiences. I am usually a happy person, promise :smile:
Reply 12
Oi, leave us invigilators alone :p: Do you realise how incredibly bored we get standing there for 3 hours?? do you?? DO YOU?? :p:

You must have just been pretty unlucky, all the invigilators I work with are top notch :smile:
The invigilators in my school still keep reading out to us that we can use black or blue ink, despite the papers saying otherwise.
Reply 14
Poor you OP - is your twin OK now?
most of ours are okay, they mess up occasionaly though. but its usualy resolved pretty quick, forgeting to hand out booklets etc.
Reply 16
Today was pretty crappy for us... Physics AS

We started at 1:24, I know that because the bell went a minute later for registration. The invigilator posted up 1:30 on the board and changed the clocks. It got to 2:20 by real time, and two students for another exam turned up, which proceeded by one of the invigilators talking to them, and them starting according to her watch at 2:25 (which she put up on the board) - but the clock said 2:30.

Then we had our "break" at 3:00 between exams, and a problem of not having enough papers for the Understanding Processes paper so PHOTOCOPIES had to be made, and those were hastily done and still warm (not good to write on). That took like 10minutes to solve and we still had music students working through their paper.

When our exam started, 3:12 according to the clock - makes sense not to change it because of the music exam, but oh no... the flipping bloke decided it would be a good idea to change the time to 3:15 so it suited us.

End of the music exam, 8 minutes early that it should have been (must have been 3:47 in reality at this point, supposedly 3:55), and one of the candidates was told (rather loudly I point out) that he couldn't finish his sentence.

End of physics came at the true time (for once), but this time because there was 10 not 2 of us doing the paper he didn't mind that someone was still writing a minute or so later.

It was a total disaster today, plus the fact that the two invigilators were talking through the exam too, and not exactly hush hush whispering either.

I'm complaining about this in the morning, distractions were unneeded if the music exam started at 1:30 like ours did, then they would have finished at the same time as us and if they had another paper (which I kind of got the impression they did) they could go elsewhere where it wouldn't cause extra disturbances everywhere else.
Wow, that's awful. :s-smilie:

Were they all random invigilators or were your school teachers just as bad?

Fingers crossed your future exams go smoothly!
Reply 18
Well... new invigilators for me, apparently they've been in all week. Our school seems to have gone away from the principle of using teachers in the last year, or perhaps they only do that for GCSEs.
Reply 19
Argh - the invigilators in our General Studies exam were appalling. Apart from the fact that building work is going on in the college right now, so we had to take the exam in the car park under a TENT (which leaked on people's work, as it was raining heavily) - the exam required you to draw a graph for the first question. I checked afterwards, and all the other groups got their graph paper before the exam started - they didn't give us any out until ten minutes in to the exam! I had already drawn the freaking graph and had to copy it out :mad:.

They also stood there in the middle chatting, left the side door open which a group of chavs congregated outside of, screaming and shouting, throughout most of the exam - could barely concentrate and they didn't even shut the door. A boy a few seats away from me was blatantly reading through the paper before we were allowed to open it, again, nobody did anything. It was just generally awful conditions to do the exam in. It was twenty minutes late by the time it even started, as the chav proportion of the student body would not shut the hell up, or sit down. No control whatsoever.

Another of our exams (I think this was English) they had nowhere in the tent to put the bags, so we were allowed to take it with our bags next to our chairs.

I believe the college is making a complaint to the exam board about the graph paper thing...