Student Gabriel Paaske (24) discovered that parts of the answer he had submitted had not been forwarded to the examiner.
Less than 10 minutes ago
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– We are at the mercy of the student himself discovering the miss, writes Annikken Løe in an e-mail to VG.
She is the director of the Department of Study Administration at NTNU. This semester, the university has had a “small handful of cases” where answers have not been sent to the examiner after the exam.
At the end of May, Gabriel Paaske (24) had a written school exam in introduction to scientific calculations. Part of the answer was done in writing by hand.
– I have no idea what happened to my answer after I handed it to the exam supervisor, he says to VG.
– I did not know about it
After submitting the answer, it should be scanned and sent to the examiner.
A few days after the exam, the 24-year-old logs on to the exam platform Inspera to review his submission. There he did not find a scanned version of the answer that was made in writing.
– The examiner never had access to my answer, and the biggest problem was that I did not know about it, he says.
–Study administration at NTNU states that they complete a large number of exams annually. In 2021, 218,000 grades were set at the university.
During an exam, large amounts of documents are scanned and all sheets are handled manually; first by the candidate himself, then by the exam guard, the exam secretariat, and finally those who perform the actual scan, Løe in NTNU.
The exam answers are scanned and read by a separate software.
– Rarely does the scanner eat two sheets at a time. Such errors are detected by always checking the number of scanned sheets against the number of sheets the candidate / exam guard has stated on the cover sheet.
– Very uncomfortable
Paaske studies at the Department of Physics at NTNU in Trondheim, and says it was difficult to understand whether the examiner could see his answer or whether it was just invisible to him.
When the student contacted the university, he got the impression that several were in the same situation.
– It is very uncomfortable. I have sat with an incredibly heavy semester and sat with five exams in eight days. That the university should joke away the answer is frustrating.
– What happens now?
– They have found my answer again, so the examiner has been told to assess it. So I’ll probably get a grade in a few weeks.
All answers come in handy
The student says he has received his answer back and that everything is filled in correctly, including the field with the candidate number.
– It has never happened that answers have not come to fruition, but we can of course not rule out that there may have been errors that have not been discovered. If individual sheets have for some reason “disappeared on the road”, we are at the mercy of the student himself discovering the slip and making contact. If the candidate does not discover the error before the censorship has fallen, the error will naturally be corrected and the answer censored again, says Løe in NTNU.
She asks students to contact the study advisor or NTNU’s examination office if they discover errors concerning the examination. This is to maintain anonymity towards the examiner.
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