Student leaders demand review after exam mistakes – VG

Yesterday it was announced that 19 students at NHH must take the exam again, because an employee by mistake published a proposal for an answer on the school’s website before the submission deadline. The case was discussed in bt.no

The student leaders at NHH, Stine Sisselsdotter Stolpestad and Oliver Wahlquist, demand that the school clean up.

– Minor errors in exams can occur anywhere, but there is a pattern here that worries us. Every semester, errors occur in connection with the exam and it seems that there is a lack of communication between the exam office and the course coordinators.

NHH should take a thorough review of the entire system and not just this case. This applies to the design of the exam but also the implementation and censorship of the exam, says leader Stine Sisselsdotter Stolpestad and deputy leader Oliver Wahlqvist at the student association at NHH.

– Condescending

They refer to several examples of mistakes they believe have affected the students at the school both in 2019 and last year.

– This applied to the bachelor subject MET1 (mathematics for economists) where one of the major tasks was unsolvable. In the master’s course Corporate Finance (FIE402), there were several errors in the design of the exam, where, among other things, it was possible to interpret the assignments in different ways. The error was corrected after three hours, but for many students it was then too late, and an extraordinary re-examination was set up during the holidays, the student leaders say.

They further point out that in the autumn of 2019 there was an error in the subject SOL2 (Marketing), where internal comments from the examiner were published to the students.

– This was very unfortunate since many of the comments were condescending to the students’ answers. In addition to these examples, there have been a number of minor errors in exams, such as typos and misinformation. This is usually discovered in the middle of exam time, which gives an extra moment of stress for the students, they tell VG.

– Do not take matters seriously

The student leaders say that in previous criticism, it has been answered that NHH should do more to detect errors in the design of the exam, but this is another example that the entire system must be reviewed.

– When semester after semester similar situations arise, it seems as if NHH does not take matters seriously and takes strong enough action to prevent such mistakes from happening again. Sufficient resources must be set aside for the examination office, and there must be consequences for the errors. As students, we work throughout the semester to succeed in the exam, and therefore these mistakes must be corrected, they say.

Mistake on exam

The last mistake made at NHH was when the solution proposal for an exam paper was published by mistake on school websites. This was 13 minutes before the exam was over. The school believes they have no choice but to let the students try again.

– Incredibly bitter and unfair, says Lars Petter Sårheim, who is one of those affected by the mistake.

At first, NHH thought that all the students on the relevant exam in the subject “Detecting corporate crime” had to go up again.

Now they have decided that only 19 of the 47 students who took the exam will have to retake.

NHH reviewed last year

Malin Arve, Vice-Rector for Education at NHH, says the mistake was a human error.

– 13 minutes is not correct for all students, as the last exam answer was delivered a little over an hour after the solution proposal was posted. Otherwise, it depends entirely on the exam how much a student can change in a short time, and therefore an academic assessment must be made in each individual case. In this case, the exam contained questions with relatively short answers, says Arve.

NHH will now hold exams again for the relevant students.

Regarding the criticism from the student leaders, the vice-rector responds as follows:

– It is true that we had two exams with formal errors last year. In one the result was new censorship, in the other a new exam. We then went through our systems and routines to avoid that something similar could happen again. We concluded that the systems are in place, but that the practice of the rules could be tightened, says Arve.

She says that they have 100 exams each semester and that mistakes can happen.

– We understand well that the students react. We do everything we can to prevent these mistakes from happening again. The last one I would say is a human miss, says Arve.

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