Invigilating: A View From the Other Side

In the course of my education, I sat many an exam. 99% of the time when you sit an exam, you are oblivious to the goings on around you. The room next door could be on fire, but unless I remember the precise statement of that ridiculously named theorem I spent most of last night trying to understand, I'll happily ignore all alarms going off around me. However, for the last couple weeks, I have been on the other side of the fence: invigilating. I've supervised a wide range of subjects and students, and I have a few observations to share.

1. Class and society hoodies all have TERRIBLE puns on them. Universally terrible. I think the History one "We get all the dates" and the Philosphy one "We think about doing it a lot" are the worse offenders. Please, someone, be original!

2. Some people have either no dress sense or must be going straight from the exam to a night club. Hmm... that's actually quite possible, but I refuse to believe that it's universally true. Seriously though, some people need to realise there's a time from tonnes of make-up and fancy clothes. 9am exams are not them.

3. Arts departments need to get better at naming their modules if they want me to take them seriously. I've found two types of annoying module title: ones that have absurdly general titles (HI2001 - Ireland, Europe and the Wider World for example) or titles that are just absurd in themselves (GG3001 - The Nature of Geography).


4. On the other hand, many sciency subjects are so specific that I doubt they'd ever be used again e.g. ZY4012 - Population Dynamics of Birds. I really wonder what makes the dynamics of bird populations so particularly interesting.

5. Does wearing a WWJD? bracelet in a religion exam count as cheating?

6. When did it come into vogue to wear ear plugs during an exam? I seem to have missed that boat.

7. It's a lot of fun to read all the various papers and imagine how you approach to answer questions that you know little to nothing about. This is much more fun in the humanities as they use words the lay person can understand in their questions. My favourite one was from the AP2002 (The Social Psychology of Organising) paper. Question one was "Explain the relationship between money and happiness." I immediately knew that the answer lay in differential equations and the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey interaction model.

8. Why, oh why, did those engineers insist on doing precise drawings on the normal scripts when graph paper was available? GAH! The inaccuracy of it all hurt me inside.

9. People have some odd exam rituals. One (very) mature student brought their teddy bear into the exam with them.

10. Despite the availability of perfectly safe cheating mechanisms (the ol' writing on the leg and going to the loo routine is actually impervious) some people are still idiots and try smuggling written notes into the exam. You'd be surprised how quickly an invigilator adjusts to noticing when people aren't looking at their script or are fidgeting at all. Just so you know, materials has been confiscated from at least two people in exams I was invigilating.

11. I have no sympathy for people who forget to bring a spare pen while managing to remember to bring a pen in the first place. Like, you're doing many exams and presumably writing a lot! What did you think was going to happen! Also people who use a pencil but don't bring a topper or an eraser.

12. You'd think that after several exams, people would remember that they have to write their seat number down on their scripts too even though there's no box for it. Also, people who leave it until you're hovering over them waiting to collect their script to begin filling out their details on their five exam books are the single most annoying people in the world and every time I'm tempted to "accidentally" drop a couple of them in the bin.

13. When checking someone's student id and details, I'm mostly just checking if they're hot and if so making a mental note of the address on their timetable.